tobiasbegley

The Third Portal: Chapter Sixty-Three

A few days after the celebration that Elio had held for everyone that had participated in the defense of Crysite, I sat at a table with Mead

A few days after the celebration that Elio had held for everyone that had participated in the defense of Crysite, I sat at a table with Meadow, Edgar, and Jinwei, the Huli Jing. 

I hadn’t spent the last few days working, but instead, had spent them in a training fugue state. I had suggested both Dusk and Dawn one of the Bronzepick Pill...

The Restored: Chapter Thirty-One

Kelly and Jin watched from the windows of the airship that they had boarded as Alyphize rose into the air on a current of red light, and they exchanged a shocked look. They’d been mainly scanning the streets below, looking for someone who was approaching the Central Aura Depository. 

Somehow Alyphize had already made it inside. 

Jin whirled around and faced the controls of the airship, then she swallowed thickly to stop the nervous bile from rising up her throat. Only ...

The Restored: Chapter Thirty

I whirled and whipped my blades up around me, prepared to try and have to work on both combat and on powering this vast drain on my aura. It would be tough, but–

An old woman, wearing ragged old clothing, and clutching a faintly glowing wooden pipe, stepped into view.  Her skin was dark, darker even than Hadiya’s, and her face was covered in weathered, worn lines that betrayed her age. The woman had to be at least eighty, maybe even older, but she was surprisingly spry as she s...

The Third Portal: Chapter Sixty-Two

Elio, the Terminarch, the last member of the rare, mutated breed that was the gemstone dragons, slammed into the earth in front of the wave. Instead of Edgar and Idyll, the wave struck glowing, multicolored gemstone armor, and while it did dig a deep furrow into the material, the force of destruction was not enough to dissolve through it completely. 

The Terminarch rose up, massive in his full, draconic glory, his scales’ jeweled surfaces further faceted by the armor that he wrap...

The Third Portal: Chapter Sixty-One

I appeared right in front of the gray haired man with the cube, my fist lashing out at his head. At the same time, I cast Fungal Lock, Enhance Forging, and drew on the ninelight morels to amplify them. 

His eyes widened, and there was a flash of magic as a shield appeared around him. My fist slammed into the bubble of force, and if it weren’t for all of the body strengthening that I’d undergone, I would have shattered my wrist with the blow. 

His force bubble might h...

The Third Portal: Chapter Sixty

“Take hold of my tail,” Edgar instructed.  Not wanting to waste time, given that I’d already spent minutes fetching Edgar, I teleported behi

“Take hold of my tail,” Edgar instructed. 

Not wanting to waste time, given that I’d already spent minutes fetching Edgar, I teleported behind him and grabbed ahold of his tail. Edgar began to nose at the earth, and as he did, his mana began to pour out of him. A mix of telluric, space, physical, life, abnegation, desola...

The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Nine

I spun and brought my blade through the neck of a four foot tall, swan-winged and nine-handed, and it exploded into a mess of soulstuff. 

The demons that were flooding through the city weren’t all as difficult to kill as the slime-like demon had been, but none of them were exactly the weak, fodder demons that I had hoped most would be. Even the weakest of them required me to exchange two or three blows before they fell, and that was adding up. 

Even though my aura was ...

The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Eight

I erupted out onto the street, then continued floating upwards in the air, but something was wrong. Very, very wrong. 

I had three recharges, one from touching metal, the one granted to me from my familiar bond with Odril, and my third arch-star. It was difficult to intentionally trigger the bond with Odril’s recharge – it wasn’t exactly convenient – but my metallic recharge drew on ambient aura and was easy to trigger. 

Thanks to the iron ring on my finger, I wa...

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Nine

No vote this week, I'm afraid.

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I looked at Dusk, and she panted, saying Idyll had managed to reach out to her after they’d come through the portal, and she’d come to get me as fast as she could. I nodded, scooping her up and teleported onto the roof of a nearby building. The building had partially collapsed, creating a small alcove I could hide in.

“I’m going to find Edgar,” I told Dusk. “Where is everyone else?” 

Dusk opened a po...

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Eight

This time, I didn’t follow the trace of my eyes, but rather an instinct of my own mana senses and nascent truths. Perhaps I was being guided by the wind of fortune and resolve both, I wasn’t sure, but I did know that I was needed.

I appeared next to a group of seven, most of whom seemed to be farm mages – a solid cluster of life, telluric, and death mages, with a handful of others. They were all peak third gate, but none of them gave me any sort of sense of danger.

The gro...

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Seven

The power continued flowing from the sky. 

Perfect advancement. 

I didn’t know how long it would last. This high up in the air, on the edge of space, Internal Pocketwatch was struggling to calculate time. 

I didn’t know how far it would bring me, but I could make some guesses. It was improving Ivy least of all, followed by Dusk, Kene, and Siobhan, so it seemed to have diminishing returns at peak third gate or early fourth gate. Either way, it should drive ...

The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Seven

Alyphyize lashed out, blurring with movement fast enough that a human’s eyes would have thought she teleported, but the Contractor spun his hands down, and his magic bound her hands to the ground.

Her hands.

Which weren’t touching the ground.

Were bound to them.

That wasn’t even possible! His magic was binding people with demons and their magics. She would believe he had found ways to tether in magic from the dreamscape or fae.

But not physical objects. The...

The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Six

Not sure I'll be able to get a chapter out tomorrow as a heads up. I'm still settling in after moving.

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Alyphize walked down the street in the direction of the Central Aura Depository, and struggled to stop herself from smiling. A demon walking down the street wasn’t unheard of in Elderglass, but an unnatural smile would make her seem slightly too suspicious. 

It had taken her the better part of two and a half centuries to pull her p...

Vote Time

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Six

It didn’t take too terribly long for me to fill Kene in on the fight, and by the end, he was shaking his head.

“That cut it pretty close to the edge,” they said. “I think you should have fled when you saw you struggled to hurt it.”

“I was planning on doing a fighting retreat, but I felt Ivy coming, and knew his dragon breath could hurt the thing a lot more effectively than my own attack.”

“That’s not how magic works,” Kene objected. “You can’t just us...

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Five

I left a Material Echo behind me, teleported behind it, left an illusion, and teleported again. I cast Mold Aura, whipping my presence around, and cast Foxfyre, leaving a Captured Moment in each one as I moved.

The balls of Foxfyre seemed to singe and burn at the spirit, and Dusk let out a cheer. Each ball was a lot less effective than the soul mana empowered Mantle Dragonfyre, but they were more efficient than my spiritshield lichen, being meant to chew through physical mana – like t...

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Four

I crept towards the frozen pitcher plants, drawing a knife from Dusk’s realm. I wiggled it back and forth along the long, thin vines of the icy blue and white surface, slowly working the plant free of the tree it had stuck to.

That took a while, and I was growing increasingly self-conscious about the fact that Ivy and Kene were waiting outside the bubble of altered time, and each second I spent in my time, many times that would pass.

I eventually managed to free three pitcher pl...

The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Five

Precision casting was difficult. I’d never been the best at shaping the super fine details of metals. I could manipulate metallic threads into general shapes well enough, but the stitching was held together more by wishes and aura than by any actual skill at weaving. 

Which was why my plan was probably enormously stupid.

I was working on creating a field of metallic dust that had been dulled enough to cover my presence as I floated along the copper of the city, while also r...

The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Four

Hadiya Abbas was, without a doubt, one of the best ritual mages she knew. 

That wasn’t arrogance, it was cold hard facts.

She wasn’t going to say that she was the single best witch she knew, because that would be arrogance and nothing more. 

Jessica was her superior at nesting wards that were more than the sum of their parts. Ivar’s grip on layering enchantments together without causing interference was without peer. Bloody Eyes’ understanding of blood magi...

Quick Update / Heads Up

I've mentioned a few times now that I'm in the process of moving cross-country, a large part of which involves basically three days of driving, with little to no time to write. Even when I'm not doing the driving shift, I'm limited to the two-ish hours of battery life while also wrangling my cats.

As such, there won't be any new chapters next week (the 21st - 25th).

I'm going to try and get things back to normal starting the 28th, but if there's a small delay due...

Funga, Flora, and Fauna

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Three

I reacted first, leaping away from the exploding stone and freezing myself in mid-air using an Immovable Lock spell. I used Foxswap to transport Kene into Dusk’s realm, exchanging him with a large stone, and turned my attention to Ivy. 

Ivy had caught his footing with a flight spell, one that radiated wings of greenish-brown light from his back. Without having the physical wings of a dragon, it wasn’t able to do much more than hold him in the air, but that was enough. Magic rus...

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Two

The day after Dusk and Dawn were up and moving, Kene’s grandmother finally awoke, which I knew because I found her perched like a gargoyle at the end of our bed that morning. 

I jerked awake the instant I saw her, conjuring Pinpoint Boneshards, and only managed to teleport them away at the last second before striking her. She stared at me, cocking her head curiously to the side. 

“What marvelous eyeballs you have!”

“All the better to see you with, grandmoth...

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-One

Meadow, Kene, and I bantered a few names back and forth, before Kene suggested someone that surprised me. 

“What about that forest dragon? The one whose mom we worked with for the mantle estragon eggs? You mentioned that he was powerful, right?” 

“Ivy? Yeah, in terms of raw power, he’s an absolute beast – no pun intended. The only person I’ve even met who came close was the assassin, and her legacy literally let her take the size from, steal parts of, and bre...

The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Three

I commented this a while ago in an update, but as a reminder: I am in the process of moving. Please bear with me and be patient, especially from the 21st to the 2nd!

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My entire vision became a dichromatic blue and gray, and the sounds of the world went tinny and very far away, as if I were trying to make out a conversation that someone was having on the other side of a busy underpass. 

I took a haltering step, moving with no balance to...

The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Two

Jessica sat in a chair, stewing in her anger and watching the demons who had captured her. On top of the sheer vitriol that she felt about the demons who had broken into her apartment and captured her, she had an absolutely pounding headache left from the poisoned air that they had used to subdue her for transport. 

The poisonous gas wouldn’t have been enough on its own to manage it. Her home was webbed in more wards than webs had webs. 

Hm. That analogy didn’t work....

Vote Time Vote Time Vote Time

The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty

It had been a good while since I’d passed out. The iron and folic acid had done a good bit to help get rid of the fainting spells. But after channeling that much power, almost all of which was beyond my ken, I thought I deserved to pass out. As a little treat. 

I wasn’t the only one who passed out either.

Dusk didn’t exactly have a body, not in the same way that I did, but she’d also strained herself to the brink in order to gather up all that power and send it direct...

The Third Portal: Chapter Forty-Nine

It was finally done. It might have taken months, but the array was complete. 

In a clearing within Dusk, there were six large concentric rings, almost like a standing stone formation. Lines of spider silk braided into thick threads ran between the different stones, and the entire thing was covered in runes. Several shallow bowls had been cut into the stones with the help of Dusk’s dominion, and within them were placed different components stolen from the nodes. 

Along ...

The Third Portal: Chapter Forty-Eight

Dusk considered it for some time, before she chirped like a choruk and said that she thought that the second option was likely the best. As a worldspirit, her dominion was already tightly bound to her inhabitants, and being able to weave a portion of the cloud’s power in through the spells she drew was going to present the best long-term advantage, especially since as a growth item, it should grow that effect as well. 

“True. It would require you to focus more, especially in th...