The Elemental Magics are the most basic fields of spellcasting. Closest to the natural order of the world. Make no mistake fellow [Mages], while they are most 'basic' they are by no means simple. Perhaps they are the easiest to initially grasp, but a master is capable of spell shaping beyond the minds of the masses.

Beware the power of [Pryomancers], [Hydromancers], [Geomancers], and [Anemancers]. Specialized mancers beyond that, even more so. These Classes mark individuals of great skill, surpassing the capabilities of a regular [Fire Mage] or other.

- Excerpt from To Do With Classes

Jayke grimaced.

Creature: [Giant Silvanid Queen] (Rare)

The mind behind the complex hive of a silvanid colony. Silvanids are woodworking crafters that create defensible nests from the wood of nearby trees. Their structures are often buildings in and of themselves and have been the inspiration of many [Architects] and [Builders]. In number, a silvanid colony can flourish anywhere with wood or similar material as they are highly adaptable to their environments. This [Giant Silvanid Queen] has brought its small hive great success in an environment that favors the biggest predators.

He stared at the unblinking multifaceted eyes, the tide of writhing brown bugs behind him, and the opening that had been chewed open to which they were leading him. His eyes fell to the [Giant Silvanid Queen's] multiple limbs, or rather, what was immediately below them.

A runic circle, glowing blue.

He stepped forward unconsciously for a better look. The floor of insects wriggled at his approach. Jayke hesitated, staring at the runic circle. He looked around, taking in the veritable mass of bugs surrounding him. Registering the amount of mana he still had available.

Reluctantly, he left with a surge of EXP. And the bugs simply let him.

He continued his explorations, keeping the location of the hive clear in his mind.

He kept his eyes keen on the environment. He healthily appreciated the dangers of a distracted mind. So with that, he scouted out all the areas he dared, even redoubling his exploration in others where he could. He combed previously overlooked areas, whether it had been by his own carelessness or inability to prior. He had to work around the myriad of creatures that called the branches home, but more often than not he'd been able to hunt them too.

He came away with a bunch of harvested materials. He had run out of crates and his [Safehaven] had long since stopped looking so cozy. It was cramped now, full of random monster parts or fruits. A myriad of resources he planned to sell. The problem of moving them out of his [Safehaven] for selling without revealing his Skill was a problem he left for his future self.

Eventually, he returned and perched above the nest's hole. Where the food was dropped in. "Why did it have to be guarded by a Creature?" He lamented. He had found nothing else. Not even the previous runic circle, he'd apparently been thrown to the other side of the Mammoth Tree.

Unless he wanted to brave the exposed road-like branches that led to the other parts of the Mammoth Tree he was essentially stuck. The Elemental Raptors dominated those paths. Jayke had checked. He had staked out each potential area to see if he could cross safely. The raptors patrolled the branches constantly, they were always passing overhead. Probably because there was always something trying its luck. Jayke had been witness to many predatory dives, each one of them was successful. Blasts of fire, ice, electricity. Each lethal, if not outright knocking their targets off the branch.

Jayke didn't fancy skydiving again.

Which brought him here. He was observing the nest. He'd been carefully noting the functions of the hive and the creatures which it managed to bring from all parts of the tree. Even the area to his current perch had been blocked off by the bugs, there were only a handful of ways in.

Jayke had been able to avoid the attention of the bugs by holding out the don't-look-at-me-stone that Sterext had given him all that time ago. He'd managed to keep the ward working by pushing mana into it every now and then. It was degrading, slowly, but not enough to impact its function. He still hadn't been able to figure it out, but he'd at least been able to keep his eyes on it. The same wasn't apparent for the bugs, they had been completely unaware of him.

Unfortunately, he hadn't thought to try it while in the nest itself. Though he felt that might not have gone so well considering the direct attention of the [Giant Silvanid Queen].

So, with the luxury of safety, he was able to divert his full attention to the problem.

He didn't have enough mana to combat the rising tide of insects. The larger flying ones were capable of putting enough pressure on his shield armor to break it and they weren't even the extent of the silvanid archetypes he saw. And the rest? They were enough alone to weight him down. If it ever got to that point, he was already dead.

Not the mana nor the spells to combat the hive as a whole. The ludicrous idea of communicating safe passage to the queen had passed his mind. Jayke squashed the notion like a bug. The giant queen looked very possessive of the circle. The entire hive was centered around it.

Jayke had a chilling thought. "Could someone have entered [Runic Skies] from there?" He hadn't seen any bones, but he hadn't seen much of anything, really.

He shook his head. He needed a method of killing the bugs en masse. His pseudo hydraulic press technique had worked to an extend. When enough bugs gathered his weight alone couldn't crush them between the barrier and the floor. His shieldbolts weren't the most applicable either. They could definitely wipe out whatever they hit, but their area of effect was too small.

He needed something more specialized.

It was a problem that demanded a creative mind. The extermination of a giant hive and its giant queen was most definitely never in Jayke's scope of learning before. Only now, it was demanded of him. He'd never had thought his programming would ever be needed for such a thing.

It was clear that his shields were breakable by the larger of the silvanids, so he made sure to start with an orb of protective magic that was larger than the largest pair of mandibles he had spotted. That would be his base, his programmable object. From it, hopefully, the rest of his magic would function. It was about the diameter of a watermelon.

The main hurdle was a familiar one. He wasn't at all experienced with the interleaving of his magic. The extent of his practice was with the shieldbolt spell. And that was rudimentary at best. What his new spell had to do was combat the silvanids in number.

He wanted to simply drop the sphere inside and let it go. He'd always been content to sit back and watch his defense algorithms in action. He hadn't thought that the feeling of watching his turrets decimate nightmarish horrors would ever be mimicked here. For some reason, that of, all things, was exciting.

That meant the orb needed to 'see' its enemies. He would've attached his detection spell to the sphere but the sphere itself did not take in visual data that the spell operated on. It didn't have eyes as Jayke did. A number of other detection methods ran through his mind, but ultimately the writhing mass of bugs made him regretfully turn to his old method.

Detecting movement.

Prior, it had been a slapdash hurried approach that lacked tact and efficiency. His protective magic had a particular data member that was tied to movement. Rather, he knew now that it was actually a function of force, or so he thought of it, rather than protection. A broader field in which protective magic carved its niche. That inherent cognizance of movement was an intrinsic element of the magic itself. Jayke had brute-forced his method and pumped magic into the previous flawed homing spheres in order for them to act upon that sense.

The entire method was terrible. That sense of movement was one meant for the very construct of protective magic to refer to itself with. Jayke had essentially jury-rigged the magic by sheer feeling. Proficient indeed. The result of which was a mana-hungry spell.

Jayke's idea was inspired by the sense of his own shields. Naturally, he could sense the strength of his magic. He could feel every impact and force, understand intimately the durability of his shields and barriers. It was a necessity of the magic. As much as he needed it to protect, more importantly, was when it couldn't.

Surrounding a rough hand, calloused by travel and more recently climbing, a shield shimmered. Invisible. It was the weakest possible shield he could maintain in any cohesivity. It wavered, unstable. Every errant thought threatened his grasp on the shield. His other hand came and pushed into the shield, parting the magic without any resistance at all. It broke, and Jayke was made instantly aware. Then, he tested pushing the shield against his hand instead, which also resulted in it breaking upon itself.

He grinned. "If this is possible..." Jayke hummed.

He looked around for his watermelon-sized orb but realized it had dissipated during his lack of attention. Quickly reforming it, he began to focus on a program. His [Lesser Data Sense] worked overtime as he weaved the code magic towards the correct inputs, programming the magic to use them correctly.

To an onlooker, it would've seemed like Jayke was doing nothing else than staring at a floating ball. But his eyes were beyond the mundane realm of the physical. They saw the data and he used them to their best.

Controlling the movement of the sphere itself was a hoop Jayke had already jumped through. His program already had the correct support to begin manipulating those variables. For now, he set the parameters for the applied force to mimic a walking pace. He tested the program so far and was happy to watch the sphere fly in a crisp circle.

The watermelon-sized sphere stopped circling as Jayke began to focus on the meat of the issue. The instantiation of another shield from the mana which permeated this one. Magic casting magic. At first, the notion might've seemed absurd and certainly Jayke had an initial doubt. But he only had the one. After it had been pushed away, he became only more and more convinced that given the mana, resources, and instruction, it was doable.

So he set about doing just that.

The hard part was tracing his own intuitive use of his protective magic. He had never had formal instruction, obviously. If he did, understanding the motivation behind every nuance of the magic would've been more than possible. He would've been able to grasp the entire process of magic and link it accordingly. As it was, he was relying on his sense of the data behind everything and his logical understandings of it as much as his natural proficiency.

He focused hard on the magic of protection. It was always the hard, cool blue-grey light in his mind. More than the light, it was a well of strength, durable and reliable. A wall to lean on as much as to hide behind. A quiet surety behind him. And above all; protective.

His code magic was different. It was fast. Fast in a way that was difficult to describe in the magical sense. Or even the physical one. Jayke's mind diverted to code itself. The magic was like a running program, constantly working. Serving a function. A busybody if personified. It was quick like lightning and characteristically intelligent. Like an AI designed to understand and be nothing but curious.

That wasn't to say either field was alive. In Jayke's mind that was simply how he had decided to categorize them. For the shields which his first magic provided and the immense utility his second magic supplied.

Then he had it.

The algorithm spiraled in his hand. It was a beautiful thing, not in the sense of its structure, but for the pure visuals. Jayke doubted he was anywhere near perfectly optimal. He admired the work all the same. Light green silicon mixed with blue, streaked with yellow particles of lightning. Within it, pixels that seemed to embody the entire function of the algorithm moved about in a slow pulse.

Jayke combined the program with the floating sphere in a flash of fading digitized pixels. The soft light dissipated and, still linked to the orb, he grinned. While linked to the magic he was aware of it. He could feel the thin shield surrounding the orb, held in such delicate faultlessness. It was the same shield that Jayke had struggled to hold in perfection, only his code magic could do so much better than him and with exacting precision.

Jayke tapped the shield, the contact of his finger was a relatively excessive amount of force to break it. It was attenuated - reduced in effect to such a degree as to be nothing but a film of air. It was the barest application of a shield that Jayke had ever witnessed. It was an order of magnitude weaker than Jayke could ever manage to control with any stability.

Then, the orb slowly drifted over to where Jayke had touched the shield - where he had broken it. "Looks like it's working."

That was the first in a series of iterative tests. Just to make sure he was on the right path at any given point in his development. Obviously, the orb wouldn't be moving towards an identified target. Moreover, a single thin shield did nothing for constant detection. Both were useful to flesh out the development, finding bugs before they happened later.

"Can't have any bugs when I loose it on those silvanids. That would defeat the purpose." Chuckling to himself, he looked around noticing the looming shadows.

The Mammoth Tree had gotten dark, succumbing to the night. He was still within the confines of the hive's territory despite being outside the nest so it wasn't likely something would attack him. The area was mostly sealed off. He didn't bother taking the risk though. He quietly undid his magic, confident in his ability to reproduce effects, before he made his way to an iron and glass door which appeared to have been set into a nearby tree all along.

The previous day he had long retired into his [Safehaven] before night came, opting to stay out of the Mammoth Tree as the shadows prevailed. It was safety precaution he found prudent.

That was the sole reason that he froze in surprise at the sudden light show. Everything began to radiate softly. He glanced around in open wonder. The entire tree was aglow with blue hues. In the biggest branches, lights traced across their circumference like tattoos. Whorling designs that were reminiscent of wind blowing across their surface. On others, they looked like veins traveling across them.

And Jayke watched dumbfounded. It was like some magical painter had just decided to use the tree as a canvas and Jayke was watching him create a masterpiece. The painting of a gigantic tree with a palette of nothing but light. An invisible brush lining the tree in gentle design.

His first thought had been to capture the beauty and his hand paused when it registered he longer had a phone. "It's beautiful." He said, hand falling to his side.

Then he just... sat down.

What was a quiet hour or two? He didn't forget the dangers as much as he weighed them against the view. He wanted to sit and enjoy it. He wouldn't let anything stop him. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. There was no exaggeration or hyperbole, no trace of sarcasm. It truly was.

Jayke Cipher was a man who did what he did without shame or embarrassment. It was a consequence of living on his own all that time. He couldn't care what others thought of him because there were never any people there. The result of which was an open honesty with his more child-like emotions - that of wonder, for example. His face was, in a word, delighted. Appreciative of the beauty, yes, but too caught up in innocent fascination to regard the sight as anything but what it appeared to be.

That was, "Absolutely stunning."

Jayke sat amid the glow of the tree, symbols and veins glowing below his perch. Right under him. He stared around in dumbstruck awe, but eventually, his orb and magic appeared again. Easier than it should've. "Weird," He said, looking at the sphere. "That didn't take nearly enough mana than it should've."

Then he stopped admiring the lights and truly looked at them. His [Lesser Data Sense] was going off and he peered at the lights curiously. Like the runes that brought him here, the veins of light which ran just underneath the surface of the bark had some arcane power to them.

Jayke blinked. "Is this the true extent of the ambient magic produced by the runes that lifted the island? The Dungeon description had mentioned the altered wildlife, but only in the acknowledgment of their increased lethality. But this? I was walking through this without even knowing."

Quietly in awe, Jayke worked on his new spell with renewed vigor.

The foundation was there, he just needed to extend the functionality. A shield sphere that produced a veil of a shield so thin Jayke could never have managed it with such precision. The beauty of his code magic was that it did it for him. A large part of him reveled in that automation, a part of his passion reborn in magic.

But that was only the beginning. Soon, after deep scrutiny and study, he was able to determine how to further interface the magics. Creating the shield in place was already an achievement, but soon Jayke had the thin shield starting small, on the surface of the sphere, before expanding outward to its designated radius. And that was something Jayke couldn't have dreamed of doing, the control was too delicate.

The other feature was simple enough to add once he tracked down the correct data. Then, he stuck his hand out towards the sphere. His hand felt nothing on its own but Jayke was carefully monitoring the mana attributed to the spell as shield after expanding shield broke upon his hand. The stripped-down shields weren't even perceptible to Jayke's physical body, he could only perceive them through his link to the spell.

He grinned. "It's not radar but it will do."

Upon breaking, the data of the collision was sent through the magic and the location was registered. Jayke couldn't figure out how to make the shield itself permeate through objects while staying cohesive, otherwise, that would've been the way to go. A much better implementation.

He regarded the spell and ran through some simulations in his mind.

A lifetime spent programming and he had incredible foresight when it came to technical problems a piece of technology might encounter. For instance, the spell had nothing to differentiate between static objects. Its detection shield could break against the floor and it would register as a target.

Again, movement was intrinsic to protective magic, so Jayke had no trouble finding the relative velocities of impacting objects and doing away with them. A simple test which involved Jayke sitting still as the orb passed him by proved his success even while the detection shields broke upon the static surroundings. He had temporarily programmed it to stop once motion was detected. Jayke waved a hand and it did.

Another problem was the fact that an expanding sphere that constantly broke upon a nearby static object would never reach its full radius thereby limiting the detection. More, the sphere itself needed to act upon those targets, and hurling itself over and over against multiple enemies would do nothing but quickly unravel the intricate magics that were attached to it.

Jayke repostured himself and sighed. Sometimes he missed programming, other times he remembered why he hated it.

In the end, he had a final product and his efforts were rewarded.

Level Up: Level 8 [Code Mage] -> Level 9 [Code Mage]