Chapter 55

Tracking down Maddy took some effort, but not too much. Delta found her in the training hall, the third place she checked, the first two being her room, then the guild’s common area.

Fortunately, Maddy wasn’t out running errands, or, what would have been even more unfortunate, on a wayfaring expedition. Wayfarers were transient by nature, so there had been a good chance Maddy would’ve been gone. Delta didn’t know any other mages that had a chance of fitting into their team’s dynamic, so Delta considered it a blessing the illusionist hadn’t set off.

Besides accommodations, and serving as a place to throw together wayfaring parties, the training hall was the most useful—and widely used—facility in the sprawling guild structure. Testing one’s skills out in the wild was ... a poor idea, to put it lightly, unless someone was seeking a fast path to a shallow grave. Delta had spent long hours here, honing her abilities. She knew her way around, even through the sections she used less frequently.

The mages had their own section of the training hall. ‘The Oasis’, people called it, and for understandable reasons—it was a place to rest, and a more crucial one for mages than anyone else. A physical fighter, like Delta, might be able to train herself into the ground, needing a stamina potion or two if she was pushing herself, but a mage? A mage could deplete their mana in a matter of minutes. So, a solution: the Oasis.

Or, rather, the obelisk at the center of the Oasis, the tall black pillar that pulsed out waves of energy, even to Delta’s poorly-tuned magical senses. The waves provided a mana regeneration effect, she knew, not that it affected her, considering her lack of mana. Most classes didn’t have mana. Mage-type or mage-aligned classes weren’t so rare they were a surprise to find, but still not common. One in ten? Maybe less.

Delta didn’t want to guess how expensive the artifact was. Sixteen feet tall—reaching up almost to the top of the vaulted, circular Oasis—and every square inch covered with intricate sigils, designed and hand-carved through a collaborative effort of mages and artificers, the object had to be the guild’s single most valuable investment.

Not all guilds had them. Only the biggest, or wealthiest, as found in a pseudo-capital city like Treyhull ... not that the Fractures were organized enough to have ‘capitals’. Sure, there were clear territory lines, carving the known pocket-dimensions into Deepshunter or Strider territory, and less frequently Sovereign or other polities, but ‘countries’, or ‘provinces’? Not exactly.

But not cheap. That was the point. The tall black pillar cost more than Delta would make her entire life, even assuming a successful career. Enough to fix all Delta’s problems up in Haven, if she could pawn it, however silly a thought like that was.

Like usual, she didn’t let her thoughts linger on that topic ... on Dad’s condition. Delta was doing what she could to scrape together funds, and stewing just put her in a bad mood. Rushing would get her killed, and then Dad would have no solution.

The Oasis’s obelisk had a centralized effect, not radiating much further than the circular room’s walls. Because of that, the training rooms—public or private—branched off the Oasis, making the mage’s section of the training facility easy to search.

Not that Delta searched it. The receptionist for the Oasis pointed Delta Maddy’s way. The mage section of the guild’s training facility required payment and sign-ins, costing a lot more to run than the fighter’s section by orders of magnitude. Being a mage in general was more inconvenient than being a fighter. More expensive, harder to find equipment, harder to find sparring partners and teachers. Things that were a difficulty for any wayfarer, but much more so for mages.

Delta didn’t interrupt Maddy, not right away. Most of the training rooms had glass windows, so before Delta walked in or grabbed her attention, she crossed her arms and observed the girl she’d shortly be offering to join their team ... or barring that, at least paying to catch Zoey up to speed.

Mages were always fun to watch. Well, besides total amateurs ... like Zoey, who had barely figured spellcasting out. Sure, Zoey’s class by itself made her a valuable teammate—most noticeably her rune-advancing skill—but her actual combat abilities, both physical and magical, were lacking. She could throw an ice-spike, but that was it. Not much flair to enjoy.

Maddy, though. Maddy was a mage through-and-through. She and Delta weren’t close friends, but they’d shared more than a few conversations, so they knew each other to some degree. Maddy came from a long, sprawling line of mages. Magework was in her blood.

Classes weren’t hereditary—or not strictly. It was possible for a mage to come from a long line of fighters, or the reverse. But lineage undoubtedly influenced a person’s class. Or maybe their upbringing, and not so much their bloodline. Being groomed by a family of mages simply made it more likely to get a similar class yourself.

But Maddy’s pedigree showed. She was fascinating to spectate. She might not be as flashy as, say, an elementalist, or another purely combat-oriented mage, but her skills were on plain display.

She wielded a long staff of white wood, bulbous and knotted at the top. A large, circular glyph floated in front of its outstretched length, thick white lines imprinted onto the air, humming with energy. Three rings. Delta was hardly an expert with magic, but she knew the number of rings indicated the potency of a spell. Shorthand was, ‘a third-circle spell’, where ‘circle’ was a close equivalent for spell strength. It lined up fairly close to advancements. A third-advancement mage could usually only cast up to a third-circle spell.

From the glyph, a stream of white darts flew in a steady hailstorm, slamming into the far wall, being eaten by the magic-absorbing apparatus inlaid there ... another reason the mage hall was so much more expensive to maintain. It took a lot of specialized equipment to keep the structure from crumbling, or magic going stray.

The darts weren’t physically damaging, as Zoey’s ice shards were. Rather, something ten times more annoying ... they were mentally damaging. They inflicted confusion, growing more intense by each successive impact. Maddy had some control over the types of delusions that would spring up, but only if she wanted to.

Most of the time, Maddy had told her, letting the spell ‘figure itself out’ was the best course of action. Why waste the mental overhead? By Maddy’s furrowed brow, and focused expression, getting a steady stream of the confusion-bolts required enough of her attention. And this was a controlled environment, somewhere Maddy didn’t need to worry over an opponent’s attacks, and defending herself ... much less a real fight, where the threat of death or injury loomed.

Delta had sparred with Maddy a few times. She was hands down one of the most aggravating combatants Delta had fought. Fighting Maddy—or any competent illusionist, she assumed—wasn’t a matter of keen reflexes and effective strategy, or even dodging and deflecting their spells.

It was ... Delta didn’t even know. Not letting her brain get scooped out by Maddy’s mind-warping powerset. Fighting against Maddy was, to be completely honest, a bit unnerving. Her whole class revolved around warping perceptions and destabilizing the minds of her opponent ... however sweet and bubbly she was personality-wise, her skills were kind of fucked up. Delta would rather fight anyone else. A person’s mind was supposed to be a sanctum. Inviolable. Having it turned to mush—even temporarily—was unsettling.

As for Maddy. She was dressed in long, flowing gray robes, which clung surprisingly tight to her curves—some equipment drop she’d found in a recent delve. Before the gray robes, it’d been white ones. Delta thought the previous had looked better ... though she appreciated the gray ones for the snug fit. But aesthetics hardly mattered when it came to equipment. Maddy, as most competent delvers, cared more about function than flair.