Morning, in the mountain range northwest of Vit Harbor.
Lara walked along the path through the woods, taking stock of this past month’s gains.
To lay a more solid mana foundation for her, Eilan hadn’t taught Lara too much theory about magic during training.
Sustained, long-term use of magic, on the other hand, had brought her control to a level of dramatic improvement.
Although Lara had only spent a short time on the path of magic, fortunately she was extraordinarily gifted, and even after that devilish training regimen she hadn’t fallen far behind ordinary people her age.
On this point, Bordeaux could be said to have firsthand experience.
Lara’s month of hellish training had all played out under his eyes, and his feelings about it could be summed up in a single line: ‘It’s not the genius you should fear — it’s the genius who works even harder than you do.’ With Bordeaux beside her as a point of comparison, Lara, too, could clearly sense just how abnormal her own rate of growth was.
Lara guided a small thread of mana, rotating and compressing it in her hand.
The mana gathered into a sphere; she could feel the mana stirring, and yet in her eyes there was nothing there at all.
It was always at moments like this that Lara could deeply appreciate what Eilan had said — for a beginner, the inability to see mana was a fatal flaw.
Her perception of mana and her visual perception were in direct conflict, and her head was already starting to feel a little dizzy.
Dispersing the mana in her hand, she kept moving along the path, climbing over fallen trees, crossing burbling streams, until gradually the ground became choked with weeds.
As Lara pushed in deeper, the path finally came to an end, signaling that she had already left Vit Harbor far behind and entered the depths of a forest where basically no one ever set foot.
All she could do was rely on 0083 to redetermine her bearings, then set off again to the northwest toward Ludan Port.
‘Crossing over the mountain range to that other port would obviously be a whole lot shorter — so why do people pick the water route instead?’ The weed-choked path got Lara thinking.
The first thing Lara ruled out was that the road was too dangerous — after all, Vit Harbor did have a first-rank mage in residence, so clearing out a single path ought to be a simple matter, right?
Three days later, Lara had reached the vicinity of the mountain’s flank.
According to 0083’s reckoning, she had about another week of travel before she would reach Ludan Port.
Lara gathered some wild greens nearby and used magic to start fire and cook her meal.
Over these past few days, she had really come to feel the deeper meaning behind Eilan’s choices.
She had learned only three spells in total — and yet between them they covered all her needs, both for wilderness camping and for combat.
To make sure she had enough stamina to handle any danger, Lara still chose to rest in place at night.
But since she was, after all, traveling alone, she gave up on pitching a tent — instead, she settled into a tree and began meditating, releasing mana at the same time to broaden her field of perception.
Replacing sleep with meditation meant her stamina couldn’t recover as quickly, but out in the wilderness, staying on guard against danger had become the more important thing.
The whole over-hill-and-ridge process turned out to be simpler than Lara had imagined.
Under 0083’s guidance she crossed the summit, eating wild greens and small animals whenever she got hungry, until…
‘Identify.’ Lara crouched in the underbrush to observe.
Not far ahead of her, a giant-bear-shaped monster was drinking water.
Between the cliffs nearby, a great fissure had formed; a rugged little trail snaked down along the rock face, and an enormous cave was wedged squarely across the only route down the mountain.
The truth about why no one ever took the mountain route was now laid out in front of Lara.
The treacherous terrain might let a single person through, but for hauling cargo it was simply too brutal.
Monster (Bear) Weight: 2042 kg Bite Force: 1866 kg Mana: 13 ‘Giant-bear-shaped monster.
Its pelt has a powerful mana-dispersing effect; small-scale magic finds it very difficult to deal damage to it.’ A very powerful monster — with the spells Lara had mastered, she basically couldn’t take it on.
Lara compared the figures against her own, and without hesitation chose to detour.
Refusing to fight battles with low odds of winning was exactly what made a competent warrior.
Avoiding the monster’s lair meant her only option was to climb down the cliff.
Standing at the cliff’s edge, she experimentally kicked a pebble over the side.
A long while passed before any sound of impact finally drifted up from below…
Lara understood now: going around wasn’t realistic either.
Maybe this was the final exam Eilan had left for her.
But how was she supposed to fight this thing?
Looking at the monster, whose raw strength outclassed hers many times over, Lara’s head went a little blank — wasn’t this difficulty level set just a touch too high?
She made her way back over to the cave to scout out the surroundings.
The giant bear had already returned to the mouth of the cave and settled in to rest.
By the look of things, it didn’t plan on leaving anytime soon.
The trail that supposedly led down into the fissure was right beside the monster — maybe she could sneak past while it went out foraging?
Lara felt she had hit upon a good plan.
So for the next two days she stayed hidden near the cave entrance.
To avoid being discovered and missing her chance to slip away, all she could eat was wild berries, day after day.
As time wore on, Lara felt like she was eating so many berries she was starting to hallucinate.
She was a carnivore at heart, and she hadn’t tasted a scrap of meat in weeks — and yet that stinking great bear in front of her hadn’t taken a single step away from the cave entrance!
‘0083, run an Identify on it, would you?
What’s going on — does this thing not eat anything?’ Lara furrowed her brow, mentally cursing this bear’s ancestors eight hundred times over.
Fine, it might not eat — but she still needed to.
‘One moment please, Master.
Please move around a bit and observe the surroundings — especially see whether you can get a direct look at the interior of the cave’s mouth, and at the bottom of the cliff.’ With no other option, Lara could only do as 0083 said.
First she walked along the cliff, finding a low vantage point.
Only when the noon mist dissipated could she see down to the bottom — and she discovered that the cliff floor was strewn all over with crystal-like ore.
For some reason, without needing 0083 to explain, she felt she already knew why.
A powerful intuition was confirmed the moment she got a glimpse of the inside of the cave.
Lara kept shifting her position from tree to tree, until at last, when the late-afternoon sunlight beamed straight in, she got a look inside the mouth of the cave — still more crystal.
Which meant?
“Beneath this mountain range there is a massive ley line, and in this area there are a large number of mana-stagnation points, Master.” The stagnant mana guaranteed the giant bear everything it needed to survive — it didn’t have to forage at all.
And by all rights, a place like this shouldn’t have just a single monster in it — which could only mean that someone had come ahead of her and cleared this great fissure out already, and that this one giant bear had been left behind as her trial.
Inside the cave’s mouth, crystal glittered, proof that the trail along the cliff edge was just a decoy — the real path lay inside the cave itself!
Hsss…
whew…
Lara took a deep breath.
A fight between her and the monster was now unavoidable.
Faced with that brutal reality, Lara was not entirely out of ideas.
What was humanity’s absolute advantage over animals?
After a brief moment of thought, Lara walked back.
Near the steep slope of the cliff she found a massive boulder.
Drawing her longsword, she chopped down a tree right beside it; using the longsword and the principle of leverage, she wedged the tree under the boulder, then chiseled out the ground beneath the stone so it would tilt and start to roll, with the tree serving as a stopper to hold the boulder in place.
OK — a simple rolling-boulder trap was now finished.
All Lara had to do was set fire to the tree holding back the stone, and the boulder would go tumbling down the slope.
As for the burn time, she could just leave that calculation to 0083.
Once everything was ready, by the time Lara had lit the tree and made it back to the front of the cave, night had already fallen.
With 0083 counting down, a single Magic Missile slammed into the sleeping giant bear.
“ROAR!!!” (Who isn’t sleeping at this hour of the night?!) Magic Missile’s power wasn’t particularly strong, and once it was dispersed by the bear’s pelt, the giant bear actually thought someone had just chucked a pebble at it.
Head not yet fully clear, it instinctively roared and clambered to its feet, looking around for whoever had attacked it.
What it saw was a single human, gripping a staff in her hand, with Magic Missile after Magic Missile gathering at the staff’s tip and being fired off, smacking into its body as if someone were trying to give it a massage.
The dignity of a bear was not to be provoked.
With a single roar it scattered the Magic Missiles into thin air, and meant to make this human vanish from the face of the world too while it was at it.
Seeing that the giant bear had taken the bait, Lara set off, as planned, toward the spot she had marked out beforehand.
The Magic Missiles that had vanished into nothing also caught her attention, and she immediately called up 0083: “Why did those Magic Missiles just vanish without hitting that dumb bear?” “That giant bear is rather special.
A moment ago it released a kind of magic that disrupts mana — it has a very powerful counter-effect against ordinary magic.” A special magic — just like Aura’s Submission magic.
The sort of magic that, at present, was wielded only by demons or monsters.
The underlying principle wasn’t necessarily complicated; it was simply that no one had researched it, so it had never spread among humans.
‘Not bad at all.
Looks like this trip is going to net me quite the haul.’ The giant bear wasn’t fast on its feet, and it didn’t know any attack magic either — to Lara, it was just a great big oaf, and she quickly led it to the spot she’d prepared.
As it ran after Lara, the giant bear smashed countless trees in half along the way; its enormous build meant its line of sight was constantly being blocked by leaves, so it couldn’t make out anything further off.
Running out in front, Lara raised her staff and aimed it at the firelight up on the slope.
“Magic Missile.” The burning tree, under the weight of gravity, kept splintering and cracking — and a single Magic Missile became the last straw that broke its back.
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