A throneroom shaking as a mammoth-sized board charged down a teenage human.

"Only one leaves alive!"

The fight between King Torc and Henry having begun, the smaller boar that'd been hiding by the sovereign bolted for shelter behind a pile of dead wolves, where it knocked shoulders with a donkey frozen in confusion and terror.

"NAKTH!"

The pillar of flames devouring Henry's body climbed upwards, a streak of orange and red drawn from the ground towards the ceiling. Only a fraction of a second after initiating, the tip of the pillar reformed into a door. Swinging open, the door spat out a figure in a monkey mask.

Henry, emerging, was propelled a little higher still by the spell's residual momentum. At the crest of his trajectory, just when his flying body begin to submit to gravity's downward call, he stepped onto one of the boss-room's wolf-bone chandeliers. His landing calculated and gentle, the chandelier received his weight without objection, swinging so little that it didn't even throw off a set of crafting supplies previously resting on it.

This first spell, , was a short-distance movement ability learned by Shamans at Tier-5.

King Torc, skidding to a stop, stared up in vexation. "Ye wee bastard, get down right now!"

"Nope," Henry replied, safe on his new perch.

Observing the items on this chandelier earlier, he’d deduced that a previous hostage, perhaps the one who'd built these tacky decorations, had taken refuge up here, the items dropping after the poor sap starved to death. This suggested that the over-sized boar couldn't reach this height.

Summoning his bow, he fired a shot to test the boar's defences.

As the arrow hit the monster's hide, a health bar phased into view above its head, but there was no discernible decrease.

King Torc guffawed at the puny pinch. "Pathetic!"

Henry, however, had been paying more attention to how exactly the arrow'd struck. Despite the negligible total damage, its points had successfully pierced the beast's hide before being ejected by self-healing. This indicated that, although the boar's health pool was massive, its Vitality stat was low, Vitality increasing health indirectly by reinforcing the toughness of the body. In other words, the boss was designed to be killed slain by Level 2 players, using their primitive weapons and attacks. From the total health pool, Henry estimated the boar to be balanced for a 500-man raid group.

Henry's Tier-5 Spelltomes, for Level 110 players, inflicted astronomically more damage than anything a Level 2 player could output. This boss fight—as to be expected for a quest in the starting tutorial—would be absolutely trivial for him.

Beginning with the procedure of dismantlement, Henry used his Spatial Bracelet to absorb the crafting items from the chandelier to clear space. Simultaneously, he summoned four Spelltomes—in addition to the six strapped to his chest—and laid them around his feet, along with a spear and several spools of rope.

One of the summoned Spelltomes, with a cover-painting of a floating sword, exuded a coloured aura that shifted in a complex, unpredictable pattern between varying shades of indigo - this was Arcane energy.

Compact Spelltome of Weapon Enlivening

STR: 1 | VIT: 1| TECH: 1 | mCOM: 155 | mAFF: 75

Effect: +1 to Level

Level Restriction: 110 (5-2)

Condition: 100%

Material: Earkencin

Weight: 282 g

Restrictions: Arcanist

'To conserve weight, the Scholar who crafted this Spelltome has sacrificed some of its bonus stats.'

was a Tier-5 spell for the Conjurist spec of the Arcanist class. It allowed the user to telekinetically control a weapon.

Squatting, Henry placed one palm on this tome, and Scholar energy shaped in miniature scrolls, quills, and ink instantly seeped out of his fingertips to meld with the leather binding. Following its absorption into the Spelltome, the Scholar energy was converted into Arcane energy, making the indigo aura increase in intensity and the speed of its colour-shifting.

All books are bound by a common thread. Flicking through so many pages has allowed your fingers to grasp a small piece of it.

activated.

Enliven Weapon (I) unlocked.

To initiate any spell, all a player needed to do was intend it, the game system reading one's thoughts seamlessly.

Instantly, a 3D constellation of five tiny stars appeared hovering thirty centimetres from Henry's face. Below the constellation floated a translucent syllable, ‘Kat.’

“Kat,” Henry chanted, his tone unhurried and loud enough to be heard clearly by the boar below - rushing or whispering would cause a misfire.

"What are ye doing?" shouted King Torc. "Stop that! Get down right this minute and fight me like a boar!"

While the beast-king ranted, Henry focused on the air around him, which'd filled with motes of indigo light, summoned into this plane of existence by his call. Simultaneously, his right hand, reaching for the constellation by his face, created a figure that allowed the tips of each finger to align with each mini-star. The handfigure resembled a bird.

As soon as this spell gesture was completed, the Arcane energy hanging in the air was vacuumed into his hand. From there, the energy spread to the five points of the constellation, before dispersing further into thousands of thinner lines.

When Henry retracted his hand, a three-wattled bellbird formed of shimmering indigo energy had grown out of the constellation. It was created with such intricate detail that one could even see the individual barbs of the bird's feathers.

The bellbird tilted its head. It took in a view of its surroundings, and then, noticing its summoner and the direction of his gaze, it swooped at the spear balancing on the chandelier beside the Spelltomes.

Colliding with the weapon, the bird exploded in a puff of indigo feathers, leaving in its death an imprint on the spear's handle of an elaborate, circular rune.

The whole process between spell initiation and the bird's self-annihilation was very brief, everything passing in about half a second.

In Henry’s vision, a new mini-star constellation of a different configuration had appeared in a different location from its predecessor, twenty centimetres out from his chest. This one was subtitled, ‘Fiel.’

“Fiel,” he chanted, reaching for it and curling his hand into the shape of a beast's jagged fang.

This was the system for all of Saana's spellcasting. Constellations would appear in random locations near where the spell had first been initiated, and the caster would need to connect them using their fingers as conduits for their Classes' magical energy. If a constellation were left incomplete for 10 seconds, it would disappear, cancelling the spell. This system made spell-casting in combat quite a dynamic process, with casters trying to find or create safe spots, while their enemies attempted to disrupt and move them.

But safe on a chandelier, the boar complaining below him, Henry didn't have to worry about such interference.

Unharassed but out of practice, it took him about seventeen seconds to complete the thirty required constellations.

After the last spell gesture, the spear lying beside him crackled with fluctuating Arcane energy. A phantom force suffused the weapon, which rose like a buoyant plank separating from a sunken vessel and climbing towards the sunlight. The spear, directed by Henry's thoughts, flew down at the boar, gliding at a jogger's leisurely pace.

King Torc, expecting a blow as weak as the arrow, didn’t give the floating weapon much thought. When the spear swung by limply and missed, the beast-king snorted in amusement.

But the spear, that swing bringing it to a blindspot behind the boar, swivelled around like a weathervane caught between changing winds. With an abrupt burst of speed, the weapon punched—as smooth as a pencil through wet paper—from one side of the boar's massive stomach and out the other.

King Torc, a fire tearing through the organs of his belly, released a guttural squeal.

Raging, he span to bite the spear and snap it in half, only to find it floating inches out of his snout's reach, unmoving, taunting him and his mammoth weight that made it impossible for him to jump.

But, in fact, Henry had put it there because the weapon's attack had a 15-second cooldown.

King Torc swore at him up on the chandelier. "Ye bastard, where’s your honour? Come down and fight me tusk to tusk, horn to horn! You snivelling, monkey-faced..."

Henry, ignoring the taunts, continued his worry-free spellcasting. Directing his Legendary necklace to take control of channelling the spear, he slapped his palm on another of the laid-out tomes, one with a cover of a skeleton holding a bow. For his other hand, casting the spell, all the veins of the arm had burst, releasing a viscous stream of blood. “Tu. Lang. Na. Ra..."

Between his spell-chants, he slipped in an annoyed click responding to the boar. "I've never been convinced about the concept of honour. I think it can only truly exist between entities of approximately equal standing, honour representing a mutual agreement between two members of the same overarching system to refrain from the harsher, more debilitating tactics that both are terrified of. In most other cases, such equality being an anomaly, 'honour' is little more than a tool of domination, a self-serving trick of the powerful to limit the weak to fighting on the grounds that they're already losing on and which, most likely, they will continue losing on. Your whingeing is a great example of this. Tusks, horns, I have neither of these. Your honour is just the advantage of a boar. To satisfy it, I would have to jump down there and waste a whole year whipping your fat-arse with my useless default attack because this poorly-designed game universe threw you at me before I even unlocked a proper one, and, even then, when I still eventually beat you after lowering myself to your level, you'd moan about how I used weapons and how I should have restrained myself further to my blunt teeth and clawless hands. Preposterous. What exactly grants you the right to define the parameters of our conflict? Why can't I respond in kind and declare that to be honourable is to rise above the primitive brutality of the body and fight like gentleman with magic from afar? That's the truth of honour. It's an arbitrary code laid down only by those who emerge victorious from the ur-state of lawless bloodshed."

The click language was a very efficient form of communication, the type of thing that could only exist in the year 2050.

“...Naek. Ti. PAEH!"

While he'd been casting, the blood pouring from Henry's arm had been channelling towards one of the wolf carcasses piled in the corner of the room. As the spell finished, this carcass exploded into a cloud of splattering rotten giblets. From the gory cloud stepped out a skeleton with a bow.

– a Tier-3 spell for the Necromancer spec of the Bloodmancer class.

The summoned minion, drawing the string of its weapon and nocking an arrow, lodged a shot directly into King Torc's distracted eyeball.

Unlike the arrow Henry had fired, this one—the Skeleton Archer's strength determined by the stats of the Spelltome—penetrated deep, its tip, shaft, and fletching vanishing into the eye's white sclera and the beast-king's skull behind.

"Deceptive bastard!" King Torc cried. "King Torc can play these magical tricks, too!"

He lifted his head, motes of energy gathering at his throat.