(I'm posting this early so as to edit it to become readable. Thank you all.)
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, it is when this rule is violated, that the spell or magic cast becomes 'forbidden by Mana itself.' when such a Forbidden spell is cast, that being, a spell that -for one reason or another- has an insufficient intensity of reaction, or under-abundance of action, Mana itself will 'fill in' for the missing part, often to the detriment of the caster.
The far more common form of 'forbidden magic' seen in todays society, is magic 'Forbidden by the Government.' This magic will not typically have the characteristics of something 'forbidden by Mana.' But is instead, in some way considered threatening to the people of power who operate as the head or near the head of the government (A/E King, Wizard King, Pope, Generals, Royalties, and Nobles.) and are therefore suppressed. With any who use such kinds of spells being often executed, unless able to prove themselves apart of one faction, or willing to submit to the power of one such group stated above.
- - - -
…
Ow.
…
'Wait, Ow?'
'We're still alive? How?!'
I blearily blink open my eyes and try to sit up. But my.. everything. Starts protesting violently.
My hands and feet feel heavy… like their leaden by something.
I try to move with my Ki, but, the constant usage so much of it has my muscles snapped and stressed
So I can't even channel enough to suppress the pain, let alone try to move, and on top of that, my magic is still depleted, so it has most likely only been a really small amount of time.
It is as I notice all of my depleted reserves that I also notice that I am laying in the very middle of the room, and directly below the window to the outside world. The moon hasn't moved even a little, so it must have not been all that much time after all.
On top of that. There is
Some kind of liquid, pooling around me.
Although I can't really tell what it is, I assume that it's the blood of that twisted collection of people…
I take a deep breath, and luckily, no pain echoes though my actions, and sigh out in exhaustion.
But a tired smile reaches my lips, as I whisper out "I won."
'… surely to. The winner. Goes the… nap…'
[ Ding ]
[ Phase One of Two, Complete! Prepare. ]
'Woh-wha…' but before I could even try to regain the rest of my waking mind, my exhaustion overwhelmed me and I fell unconscious.
- - - -
I walk through the birch forest with my cat, she's a grey tabby, with yellow eyes, and I trust her enough to go on walks with her.
The path we're walking down is winding, and rocky, and the autumn wind is cold. It's an off day for me, so I decided to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the big city and come out here to reconnect with nature.
And spend some quality time with my cat obviously.
My coat flaps in the wind as we continue on, the leaves falling from the birch trees are beautiful reds and oranges, and as the sun beams in between the branches, the occasional evergreen tree is a nice back drop to the gorgeous scene.
As we walk over a small bridge to continue down the path, I pick up a rock on the Sto- wood. The wood flooring of the bridge. And drop the leaf in my hand into the rippling river.
For a moment, the wind picks up, roaring in my ears, as it ruffles my short blonde hair, my cat meows at me as she paws at my ankle, asking to be picked up.
I chuckle heartily as I bend to fulfill her wish, and gather her in my hands, and once she's settled in my arms, I set off again down the rest of the bridge, and continue onto the nature path.
'Not many people on the path today' I note idly and just after I think that, a jogger rounds the next bend in the lead covered path, and gives a short wave as he passes me.
'Huh, nice to see other people are still walking this path even today' I think with contentedness.
The winding path eventually straightens out, and the incline begins, my cat has moved from my hands to my shoulders as I start up the st- wooden steps of the path
As we get higher up the mountain, more and more do the evergreens come to replace the Birch
And just as the shining sun is about to set on the mountain, we make it to the summit and I take a seat as I take off my back pack.
I take out a can of tuna for my cat, and protein bar and shaker bottle of water for me.
It's as I'm languidly drinking from my water bottle and looking around at the scenery of the sky slowly turning from an orange to purple, that I happen to glance into a puddle of still water next to us that I freeze.
'Grade A punk material...' My face is like sculpted marble, my frown and laugh lines are gone, I mouth around my teeth, not a single sharp tooth.
'Who the fuck is that..?' I think as I stare into the puddle, where can be seen in the fading light of the sun, an Adonis like figure with perfect skin, lushly groomed golden blonde hair, and bright blue eyes stares back at me.
'Even back then, I wasn't anything close to looking like that…'
I blink and suddenly the sky's are a dark grey, and it is raining like crazy.
As I look at around, my cat is huddled underneath my leg, attempting to hide from the rain.
'What was my cats name again?'
And suddenly the cat is looking at me, glaring as it almost mechanically shivers in the cold, it's eyes dilate so much that the iris is gone, the sclera follow suit as the pitch black pupil of the thing under me consumes the eye completely.
I blink and suddenly, I'm at a poker table, green fuzz and everything.
The dealer is that cat thing, still with the pitch black voids for eyes, the rest of the players are mannequins, all slumped in their chairs, all with oil dripping from them in some way.
Each of the players push a pool of the oil dripping from them into the center of the board, to act as ante.
I push some of my blood into the ante as well.
The cards have been dealt. I peek at them, two aces.
The pool is drawn. The cards land in the oil and before they can be turned over, are stained black and red, completely incomprehensible.
The one to my left raises by putting it's still beating, crude oil drenched liver into the pot.
I and the rest meet the raise, I should feel extreme pain from the removal of my liver what with the massive hole in it as well, but all I feel is a bit more drained as the fourth card meets the same fate as the last three.
This time, the two mannequins furthest from me fold, and when they do, pale grey hands come down from the shadows above the singular dangling lightbulb and take the losers away.
I raise, by going all in and staking my heart in the pot.
I begin to slump in on myself as the last card is pulled, same verse, same as the last.
I call.
I flip my cards over, I am not met with two aces, but with two cards that are incomprehensible from all the blood dyed into them.
The other two players both call the same, but their cards are covered in oil, and therefore also, unreadable.
Just before the dealer starts raking in their earnings, i halt them and ask them to clean off the cards.
I can feel the glare of the beings about to take me away. As well as the dealer, and even the other players.
But I stand my ground, and eventually the dealer complies, and waves a handkerchief and the cards are revealed.
The player to my left has a ten and a two, the player on my right has a three and a five.
Where once was a pair of aces is now two cards that simply read JOKER
The river is revealed next. The first three are a two, a nine, and a queen.
The next card is another queen, and the last is the ace of spades.
'I use my jokers to act as aces, and make a Straight with the addition of the pair of queens.'
As I think this. The other two get taken by the hands as well, and as I am taking my winnings, remembering to put my heart back inside my chest, and my liver back in my side, I glance at the dealer, and I freeze.
The dealer has grown devil horns, and their previously pitch black eyes have shifted to a deep red, with now snake like pupils where once was pitch blackness. the thing in front of me grows shadowy and incomprehensible as it begins to shake with rage.
As this happens, a howling reaches my mind. And as the devil attempts to reach over the table to wring me by the neck, the howling gets so bad that blood begins to spill from my nose and my head is met with a sheer and undeniable pain.
It is with this pain, that I realize one, very important thing.
'This is a dream.'
And it is with this revelation that the devil in front of me screams in anger and tries to do something, as the mental void around us begins to collapse.
- - - -
Underneath the ivory wasteland that is the grand mana zone of hail, lays a dungeon. And within that dungeon, a group of humanoid monsters. Whenever someone enters this dungeon, they never return, unknown to most, it is because they are converted into these monsters by the being controlling them.
Because within this dungeon, and the master of these human beings, whom have been twisted beyond nature, is a grimoire.
A five leafed grimoire, one that holds within it's pages, a devil of immense power. So much of this power does this devil hold, that it is able to use it's magic to invade the dreams of who so ever comes into it's range, and, if that devil's magic takes hold of your mind, will turn you into a mere puppet mentally, before corrupting you into a puppet, physically.
And as Shepard fell to the temptation of slumber while in such a mentally exhausted state, it is most assured that she will join the ranks of the corrupted.
But as more blood accumulates around her unconscious form, and the grimoire in question floats up from the corpse of it's now dead minion, knife sticking out of it's leather cover. As it floats towards Shepard, it opens up and flips through it's own pages as the black aura surrounding it gets deeper, and the knife gets thrown across the room.
It stops on a page as it gets near the dark grey haired girl and from the page manifests a portal, within the impossible depths of this void black portal, crawls out a countless amount of grey skinned, clawed hands that grasp blindly towards the malnourished little girl.
But as the hands silently creep closer, the blood pooling around the child builds to her face, and a bit makes it's way into her nose.
A few moments after this, she jolts awake with a snort and coughing fit.
- - - -
'Hugh, what the fuck…' I think as I quickly try to blow all the vile substance from my nose and cough up a lung trying to get it all out of me.
After a few moments of this, I manage to take a bleary look around, and, yup, I'm in a pool of blood… I decide to take a look to my left. and find that a few of the messed up weapons got blasted over there, probably from that last attack, but to my right, there is a grey hand about to grasp my face.
It takes a moment before my sleep addled mind realizes this is a bad thing.
I jolt away from the fuckin hand as I get a better view of the issue.
The issue in question is a lot of hands escaping from a portal made by a book. A grimoire, probably.
The system is trying to get my attention, but I'm too focused on trying to get this thing away from me.
It is only now that I realize that my limbs are still covered in stone.
Using what marginal amount of Ki I have to spare in my weakened state, I break the stones holding me back, and shuffle backwards and further away from the mass of hands.
Ki, just used the last of it to get rid of the stone.
Mana, I regained a little when I was sleeping.
But like, such a miserable amount that I would only be able to make and maintain a singular mana string for about… five seconds.
As my back hits the wall, I look around to see if I can spot anything to help me kill this thing.
I see in the wreckage of the weaponry the hydra was using, is the coiled wand. I scramble over to it. And pop the crystal out of the wooden body it was laying in.
I then take a moment to wonder how I should take that blasted seemingly slow ass thing out.
Within my mind, remains the image of the moon, seared into my mind like a wish upon a forsaken night.
I know I'll need both hands for this, so I pop the crystal in between my teeth.
Then I crouch, hands on the floor. As I begin absorbing mana from the crystal in my teeth, and instantly start pushing the mana in the stone into my hands.
From where I am, through to the rest of the room, a circle gets engraved into the floor by a maroon light, as the circle takes full form, I begin to engrave the lines and circles I saw in the pattern above.
And in less than five seconds, a fully formed runic array takes up nearly the entire room.
And as soon as I complete it, it glows red, then, just as the gemstone in my mouth is just about to lose all of it's charge, the eight doorways, all corisponding to a color open up, and the lights dim to nothing as the magic that made them emit light is absorbed. Giving the rune a sort of rainbow effect.
No longer having a part to play in the maintenance of this rune, I stand and hastily look around for my knife.
But as the ripples of all different colors of magic glow upon this rune, so too, does the room flood with the magical darkness that used to rest outside of it.
I think I spot it just as the darkness starts to obscure the room.
Due to the sheer gluttony of this array, the magic of the orbs glow bright for but a moment more before being exhausted. The rune needs just a bit more magic to activate, the blood at the very center of the rune began to float, but as the magic of the light fixtures gets fully expended, the blood begins to fall.
but just as the light is fully extinguished I can feel that a different magic has taken the place of the lights.
As the darkness invades the room, it would seem that even now the moon's light cannot be obscured. I watch in raptured, as from the beam of light the celestial body sent into the room, a small tendril of a magic signature so potent, even its proximity made me freeze for a moment.
As that tendril connected with the rune, I snapped out of my shock and took advantage of the help in order to look for my knife.
I think I saw it over by the weaponry…
I bumble over too it in pain, and blindly pat at the ground and -yep that's my sharp ass knife.
And just as I find it, I glance at where I can sense the dense lunar mana is being ever so slightly drained to. And in front of my eyes tearing asunder the now mostly darkened hall, a liquid-esque rend in space, leading to what seems like a desert of white sand not too dissimilar to where I am now, with a sky of pitch blackness as it's backdrop, coming into view.
My confusion at the familiar landscape was easily replaced with shock as the screeching of the air being ripped into a vacuum pops both of my ears.
That pattern was a portal to the fucking moon.
As I witness the marvel before me, my breath is quite literally taken away. As is with the rest of the oxygen in the room, as well as everything not nailed down. Like the grimoire. And me…
I fall the the ground but manage to dig my knife into the stone before I meet the same fate as the air and get sucked out into space.
The far too cold, and more than a little terrifying grip of a human like hand grabs onto my foot. I look down, and see the grey form of countless hands reflected by the blinding light of the moon's surface. the god damned book is holding onto me…
I kick off the wrappings around my foot, and the book, still with it's hand around the wrappings, and just before getting thrown to the wastes of that place, the book closes it's own portal, just before getting pulled into, and expelled out of, the moon wormhole.
But the connection between the moon and here doesn't turn off.
In fact, I can feel my consciousness slipping as all the oxygen in the room is taken in by the portal as well.
In a last ditch effort to turn the thing off, I channel the slight amount of mana I still have left in my body, into the knife, and suddenly, I'm sliding all too uncontrollably towards the cold embrace of the moon's surface.
Until multiple parts of the rune get cut up by my actions and the mana starts escaping the array, that is.
It is as I am about to come in contact with the portal, that the amount of magic being pushed into it becomes less than is being poured out, that the rend in reality closes, and reverts back to regular blood.
I collapse bonelessly to the ground. Just inches away from the once again pool of once human blood…
And take a deep breath as air howls back into the room from on high
I turn onto my back to face the moon in a heap of pain and bad decisions, only to find that the moon has moved slightly, and now marring it's surface, was a mass of shadow, leading to an unnatural crescent…
And, that the pattern that once seared itself into me has fallen to an obscure haze within my mind.
Under the light of the moon, does my exhausted mind note that a system message has popped up before me.
[ Ding ]
[ LESSER DEVIL DEFEATED. ]
[ extra rewards gained for defeating the boss in a Unique way!
Extra reward gained for defeating a foe more than one Rank higher than you! ]
'Ahh that's greeeat…'
[ would user like to choose rewards now? ]
"Ghnn. Wha.. sure. Whatever, j-just rrandomly select h-what ever t-ha rewards- are…" I manage to stutter out through the pain and exhaustion.
Then I blink and look past the system, the moons face is once again clear of any kind of darkness.
I passively note the board change into three rotating dots before I fall unconscious again…
- - - -
That's that! The big boss has been dealt with! Now all Shepard has to do is get the fuck outta here and back to civilization, surely, there won't be any terrible surprises waiting for her when she returns :)
sure hope those rewards are good enough for the cost of getting them~
Hope you liked it. Comment on the auxiliary chapter I made called 'small detour' it has three things for my readers to vote on.
And the secondary small detour in case the first options weren't to your liking
And in case I don't see ya, good afternoon good evening and good night.