Mana Mirror: Chapter Forty-Five (Patreon)

TW: Brief (and punished), but still there bits of animal cruelty.

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Mallory seized the edge of the barrier and leapt over it, landing next to me.

“Come on, kid,” she said as she started sprinting down the road, following the quickly moving shark creature.

I started to say that I wasn’t a kid, but I realized that might make me sound even more like a kid. In the end, I shut my mouth and started sprinting…

And examining Mallory with my newly enhanced mana sense. There was something deeply strange about her life energy, something that I couldn’t really put my finger on. It seemed… Flexible.

I didn’t know how else to say it. The flows of life energy were already flexible, since they moved with the body, but these seemed even more flexible than normal ones. If my own life energy flows were flexible in the same way my body was, these were flexible in the way rubber was.

Maybe she’d done something with transformation magic to adapt them? Meadow had alluded to the idea that something like that was possible, after all.

The shark suddenly whipped around a corner with more speed and agility than should be possible with its body. Mallory and I stumbled, slowing our sprint to turn down the alley where it had moved.

“Slipsharks are strong enough for their gate, and they’re good runners,” Mallory said in between breaths. “But their offensive power’s pretty weak. And…”

We turned down the alley again, where it wrapped around a building and saw the neon orange shark staring at the brick wall in confusion. It didn’t seem to understand why it couldn’t keep going. It rotated around in the air and blinked its big yellow eyes at me, then began sliding towards us.

“They’re not familiar with the surface,” Mallory finished.

The slipshark was actually kind of cute as well, but it could still potentially hurt someone. It was best to send it back to the sea where it belonged…

I thrust out my hand and cast Fungal Lock over the slipshark, but its own mana rose up. It was some strange combination of physical mana and lunar mana, with aspects of other things much fainter.

The slipshark wiggled forwards and burst out of the Fungal Lock spell, shooting down the alley towards us. Mallory raised her hands and her wolf-shaped shadow rose to meet it.

The slipshark accelerated and released a small blast of water from its mouth, striking the shadow, which absorbed the hit with a stagger. The slipshark was on it then, hitting the wolf and knocking it out of the way as it streaked past.

Mallory frowned and let the spell dissolve to conserve mana. I was already running to follow the slipshark, calling mana through my mana garden to twist around the fungi inside it, preparing to cast it again with more force the moment it stopped its absurd movement.

Despite not having understood the concept of a wall very well, it was still smart enough to realize that its acceleration spell was able to blow past us and back out onto the main street.

Mallory stopped at the edge of the alley, and I stopped to.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Shut up,” she growled, and then the life energy in her body went absolutely wild.

Her teeth began to sharpen and elongate, but in a very different way from Kene’s. His were almost like a shark’s, these were more like a dog’s.

Fur exploded from Mallory’s skin, and she fell onto all fours, her body shifting and rippling like water.

Her mana surged and boiled around her, and I abruptly realized why her spell had mixed together life and lunar magic together so strangely. It wasn’t that she was mixing mana – her mana was a composite of types, like a dragon’s was.

Mallory’s form stabilized into that of a massive black wolf, nearly the size of a pony.

A werewolf.

My eyes widened. I’d never actually met a werewolf before. They were more common than dragons, sure, but they were still rare.

The wolf let out a growl, and it took me a second to translate it.

“On.”

Mallory lowered her shoulder and I swung myself onto her back. She took off at a… gallop? I wasn’t sure if that term applied to a wolf.

She burst out after the slipshark, me clinging to her fur tightly so as not to fall off. The slipshark somehow must have noticed that we were catching up because it began to pour on the speed, sliding across the ground with increasingly absurd speed.

I went ahead and unleashed my spell. It tore through it quickly, but it slowed the shark down long enough to let Mallory start to catch up. I cast Fungal Lock a second time, pouring power into the spell to hold it down.

Mallory leapt at the Slipshark, who spat another burst of water at her. She growled and shook her head, a smaller, shadowy copy of herself emerging to absorb the hit before she pinned the slipshark down with her body.

The slipshark shot out from under her, its three sets of fins glistening with gray energy. Where Mallory had been holding it down, the slipshark’s small scales left cuts and slashes on her.

She let out a yowl of pain, and I cringed, suddenly wishing I did have a healing spell after all.

The slipshark turned to face me, and I cast a Fungal Lock with one hand as I sketched with the other. A moment later, thin threads of green energy surrounded me, and the slipshark crashed against them. The briars cut into the shark, and it let out a sound that almost reminded me of the bark of a dog as it skittered back and stopped, staring at me warily.

My eyebrows went up. The Briarthreads spell had stopped the shark. It had drained a decent chunk of mana to do it, but it had worked.

I grinned as I cast the Fungal Lock spell onto it. I expected the slipshark to burst out instantly, but it seemed far more stymied than it had been the first time. It tried to wiggle, but it was struggling.

A moment later, it clicked. They were slippery, but they must rely on movement somehow to amplify their power. Every other time I’d hit the slipshark, it had been moving already, and been able to escape. This time, it didn’t.

I cast another layer onto the Slipshark and turned to Mallory.

She’d turned back to her human form, and the lacerations had begun to shrink, but her clothes were definitely ruined, between the tears and the blood.

“You know healing magic?” I asked.

“No,” she grunted. “Took a healing potion.”

Oh, right. Mallory was rich, if her suit was anything to go off of. I shouldn’t be surprised that she was able to afford commodities like that.

I turned and scanned the street, looking for…

There!

I darted over to a street vendor that sold skewers of fruit, vegetables, and meat and slapped down a handful of coins.

“I need meat to lure the shark back,” I said.

The person behind the stall, a large man with a large mustache that looked vaguely like a hamster, picked up several skewers and shoved them at me.

“Here, take ‘em. I’ll send the bill to the Watches later.”

I turned and ran back to the slipshark, then let out a loud swear.

Mallory punched the shark in the nose, pushing it back, and giving it the momentum that it needed to free itself.

“Primes, Mal!” I shouted. “It was contained. You didn’t need to do that!”

“Well it hurt me,” she spat

I sprinted as quickly as I could to get over. The slipshark slid back, then rocketed forwards, landing right between Mallory and myself.

I started to cast Fungal Lock, but before I could, shadow and light twisted in the area, and then a burst of bright light shone from the slipshark’s scales. I shut my eyes, but I wasn’t able to block out the light before I was partially blinded and stumbled back. I heard Mallory cursing loudly, and I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes.

The slipshark had slipped down the street, thankfully in the direction of the ocean.

“Its powers are based on movement,” I said. “If it’s not moving, I can lock it down, and we can probably just carry it back to the beach.”

Mallory let out a growl, and we both tore down the street after it. The slipshark noticed, and began using its acceleration. I began to cast Fungal Lock after Fungal Lock to stop it from gathering any speed, and it mostly worked, though it drained me quickly.

Mallory leapt into the air and landed in front of the slipshark. It froze for half a second, and my Fungal Lock spell wrapped around it.

“Got it,” I wheezed.

“Good,” Mallory huffed, her irritation visible. “I’ll go ahead and kill it then.”

Before I could protest, she drew her hand back, shadowy claws forming around her hand.

My eyes widened as her claws plunged down, towards the prone form of the slipshark.

This wasn't ok.

The world seemed to slow down around me. It wasn’t a temporal spell, merely an effect of adrenaline, but it still felt as if I’d gone under the effects of a haste spell.

How could I stop this?

I needed to free the slipshark first, and that would be easy to do.

I could entangle Mallory in a Fungal Lock, but she was second gate, and judging by the mana coming off of her claw spell, it was too.

I’d need a second layer of defense, and if I got that, my suit could probably shed the rest of the blow with ease.

I reached inside my mana-garden, where I could feel the barely formed shrubs of the Briarthreads spell. I slammed mana into them, forcing my garden to my will.

I knew the spell diagram for Briarthreads.

I just didn’t have the repetition to master it, to make it part of my mana-garden. And that would not do. I needed it.

There was a crack of something inside of me, and time seemed to resume its normal flow.

I cut off power to the Fungal Lock holding the slipshark, while casting one over Mallory. At the same instant, my life mana began dropping exponentially quickly as green threads of briars erupted from my body, and I raised my arm to block Mallory’s strike.

Mallory’s claws tore through the mycelium instantly, just as I’d expected, and hit the Briarthreads. The threads wrapped around her hand, opening small cuts and poking her, small pinpricks of blood forming, but she ripped through that layer as well, and my life mana guttered out completely.

The claws were starting to flicker, but they were still there. They came down on the arm of my suit jacket.

And stopped dead, the protections woven through the silk holding her claws at bay. To my surprise, I felt the soft nuzzle of the slipshark against my leg as it began to call water around itself.

It unleashed a powerful torrent of water that shot through the air and struck Mallory in the chest, sending her careening back. I took the opportunity to convert my spatial mana into life mana, and wrapped her in another fungal lock.

The slipshark shot forwards and circled her, a strange, watery slime encasing her as it did, and then it stopped back behind my feet.

Mallory tore through our spells and rose to her feet a moment later, staring at us.

“Fine,” she spat after a second. “If you want to defend that thing, you don’t get any more help from me.”

She turned and stalked off towards the beach, and I let out a sigh of relief. I was mildly worried that she’d try to keep fighting me. I might have been able to call enough mana to knock her off guard, but she still was far stronger than I was, and if she wanted to continue the fight, there wasn’t going to be anything I can do to stop her.

The shark let out a curious chirping sound, and I gave it a tired smile.

“Yeah, you’re safe now, buddy.”

I slowly led it back to the beach, feeding it bites off of the different skewers. For whatever reason, it seemed the most excited by the pineapple. That felt weird to me – why did a shark like fruit?

Did all sharks like pineapple? That didn’t feel right to me. I was pretty sure that sharks were almost exclusively carnivores, and wouldn’t be able to eat fruit.

Then again, this was a magical shark that could come on land, move with absurd slipperiness, and even blind people. Maybe it had adapted to eat some, since it could come on land.

When I returned to the barrier, leading the slipshark, I was pleasantly surprised to see Mallory wasn’t there, and the surge had mostly dissipated. The only one still blocking the gap was Diana, herding things away with her mind magic.

When she saw me approaching, she gave me a half smile.

“Hello, Malachi. Thank you for helping. Mallory told us what happened, but I’d like to hear your side of the story as well, before I report you.”