Ronan stared at the twin tags floating above the almost-turtle’s head. It wasn’t a turtle head, though, but a beak like an octopus would have. There was also the matter of the tentacles that protruded from the back of its shell. There were… too many to count, and Ronan didn’t particularly want to stare at the writhing mass of barbed flesh for too long.

  [Tentoise - MINI BOSS][Mutated Kaiju Lv.399]

  A second mini-boss had appeared. Right as Ronan was on the cusp of a magical breakthrough. He supposed it was ironic timing. Nonetheless it made for a troublesome situation.

  Spinodoxis was not letting up its assault. If anything he thought that the jets of water were growing more powerful as time passed. Now he also had to worry about barbed tentacles and whatever else the new kaiju had to throw at him. Truly a nightmare.

  Ronan was not going to let that get him down. He was on the verge of understanding something deeper about mana and magic and he refused to let some big ugly monsters stop him from accomplishing it. He continued to unleash Ethereal Slash, only now he tossed a few in the direction of the new mini-boss.

  They did little, its armoured shell proving far tougher than the hide of the first kaiju, but when one struck one of its writhing tentacles it left a deep gash that nearly severed the limb. That brought a smile to his face and proved he was not entirely powerless against the oversized mutants, just lacking the right techniques.

  While evading the barrage of strikes he used Mark of the Eternal Seeker on Tentoise. There was no point in not doing so as he could mark up to five enemies at once. He marked it at the rear of its shell, where the tentacles protruded. His hope was that any attacks that struck it there might carve off one or two of its offensive limbs and make the battle easier.

  He couldn’t quite figure out what the factor was in both Ethereal Slash and his mana platforms that was similar. He was on the cusp of understanding, but the constant movement and lack of focus on only his spells meant that Ronan couldn’t work through it.

  Just when he felt that he had grasped the tortoise kaiju’s attack patterns, it suddenly opened its mouth and unleashed a massive stream of purple flames into the sky. Ronan started leaping away, but he was too slow.

  One of his legs was engulfed by the purple fire. It clung to his skin, burning through the remains of his suit and then slowly cooking his flesh. Even with thousands of stat points in resistance and all the rest of his damage resistances the flames continued to burn. Worse, they did not go out. He needed to get into the water. If water was even enough to stop them.

  The pain was manageable. He had been through worse. It was the constant damage that worried him. If the turtle continued to land its flamethrower he would be in trouble. It seemed that it was not an endless stream of fire. Around ten seconds after it had unleashed the torrent of burning death it closed its mouth and stopped it. It was followed by a storm of tentacles and jets of water, both kaiju mounting fresh assaults at the same time.

  More than a few of the jets struck him, leaving nasty bruises. One even cut through his thigh and blood started to pour from the wound. Ronan was able to seal it fairly quickly but it was worrying how much damage he took from a spell that Spinodoxis was seemingly able to spam.

  However, things were not completely hopeless yet. Ronan had understood something about the nature of mana when it left his body. It was not by mastering Ethereal Slash, but instead manipulating his mana platforms in different ways, that he finally figured out why they both worked despite being different applications of mana and why the system-skill was more stable at range than his mana platforms, which tended to dissipate almost as soon as he jumped off them. The answer lay, as was seemingly always the case with sorcery, in his intent.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  He realised it when he randomly formed a mana platform, not to jump on, but with the express purpose of flying forwards. It had worked, with the platform floating through the air under its own steam. Then, when he had stepped on it to jump away the platform immediately shattered and he lost some mana as backlash. After that he pushed the ‘intent’ of each platform in various ways and discovered that the visualisation and desire he had for the spell when forming it was almost as important as his physical control and mana manipulation when channeling said spell. That was when it clicked why Ethereal Slash was so stable. It was an external spell that had a single purpose: to project a physical slash across space.

  Unfortunately right before he could put his new discovery into practice Tentoise unleashed another stream of purple flames alongside a diving leap by Spinodoxis as it attempted to swallow him whole.

  Ronan was an agent of chaos in the battle that followed. He started to wonder if he would even be able to take down both mini-bosses, but that line of questioning wouldn’t get him anywhere. If he died, then he died. What mattered was getting the most he possibly could out of the encounter.

  Ronan believed he had all the tools necessary to turn his near-suicide attempt in the previous stage into a fully formed spell that would devastate anything he fired it at. All that remained was the first field test. He stopped throwing spells and javelins and started weaving together the construct. It wasn’t that complex, given that most of the mana went into condensing and multiplying the explosive force. A small portion was used to direct the explosion—he had to make some changes so that there wouldn’t be a repeat of his previous failure if it happened to be a critical hit—but that was it. He was hit by a few tentacles and water jets while moving and channeling, but for the most part it was on his extremities. Despite that his health points were down to two-thirds. Not great, but better than expected against two monsters over a hundred levels higher than him.

  He soon finished forming the spell. What came next would be the culmination of his experimentation across two mini-boss battles and over fifty lives of steadily studying sorcery. Ronan hoped it wouldn’t blow up in his face.

  He had figured out that he was able to make mana move, but the spell itself couldn’t take on more without destabilising. So his solution was to just make a separate mana ‘rocket’ that would blast the explosive spell towards his target. The beauty of it was that spells also functioned with Mark of the Eternal Seeker, so he didn’t even need it to be accurate, just fast as fuck.

  For a while he had toyed with the idea of just tossing it physically, but there were two main issues with that. The first was that every time he’d used mana and a lot of physical movement it had gone wrong. Spectacularly. He had no desire to see what happened if he tried it with the most destructive spell he’d ever casted. The second was that if he threw it by hand the direction would be wrong and the focused aspect of the explosion could end up missing the intended target.

  By using an attached payload delivery he would ensure that the direction of the explosion would always point into whatever he was trying to blow sky high. So he used his other hand to form the rocket—it wasn’t necessary but the physical aspect of using two hands helped him stabilise the process the first few times he cast a new spell—and attached the two together.

  Of course the new mini-boss chose that moment to suddenly unveil another technique. All of its tentacles rose into the air and pointed at Ronan. He glanced at them, not thinking anything of it, until they made a squelching sound and fired what had to be thousands of razor-sharp barbs at him.

  Ronan cursed. He didn’t think he could move fast enough to avoid them all. He tried his best, but a few would strike his body. He doubted he could keep his spell stable while getting hit that many times. So he was forced into launching it early. With less than two seconds to decide, he couldn’t pick a target. So he just blasted it off with as much mana as he could stuff into the rocket and let it fly. It screamed, a pulse of mana rippling through space outwards. He felt a few tugs from his new dimensional affinity but ignored them. The barbs hit. He winced as three buried themselves in his thigh.

  Then everything went silent and the world turned blue.