All it seemed to want was to take a “host”, and it didn’t exactly seem inclined to ask. That was enough; Serenity knew it had to die. There was only one question left to ask before he dealt with it. “Can you undo what you did to Rube?”

Right, names. Serenity was pretty sure he knew how to identify Rube to the djinn. “The man you were trying to make into a host.”

Serenity paled. He suddenly understood what it was about the djinn that disgusted him: it had twisted and torn something about Rube that was connected to the Origin Point, to his Potential. It was a perversion of a part of him; when he realized that, it explained everything. Not only that, it felt right.

That also meant that both he and the djinn shared something. However much that pissed him off, Serenity wasn’t one to deny the obvious.

He hoped Elatiq was wrong about “the Change”. If it was progressive and there was no way to stop it, the consequences for Rube’s future were severe. Serenity could think of several possible things to try, but they all started with dealing with the djinn.

Soft words leaked from the djinn across the connection.

It didn’t take much thought to realize that Elatiq was talking about Serenity. Serenity had no interest in becoming a host; should he kill the ritual or not? He hadn’t felt an attack yet and the ritual gave the djinn an access but with significant defenses.

Yes, he should. No matter how good the defenses were, the telepathic link was a weak point and he didn’t need that, not when he was only somewhat skilled with the Mind attribute. He knew enough to get by, but he’d always won fights with mentalists by meeting them on his own terms rather than theirs. “Turn it off, Rissa!”

She had the fast shutdown; he could take it down almost as quickly, but he needed to throw up that mental shield he’d thought about, and quickly.

Serenity felt the ritual collapse while he was still building the spellform for the protective spell. He hated the fact that he couldn’t cast them quickly; the best he could do was Infuse them, and a shield was best if it was built at the time for the actual threat. Serenity had Infused a shield, but it wasn’t tailored for what he now knew the djinn actually was; instead, it was a fairly generic Mind-Affinity shield.

Serenity held the threads of the spellform he was working on and Evoked the shield anyway. It would set him back a little, not a lot, but it would help protect him and that was worth a lot. Controlling an Evocation while holding a spellform was moderately difficult, but it was something Serenity had long since learned.

The shield flowed out and Serenity was immediately glad he’d made that call; a pressure he hadn’t even realized was there eased just a little. It was obvious that the shield wasn’t stopping all of it, but even a little was helpful - and he’d already paid the mana cost, so . Hopefully his resistances could handle the rest; that was what they were there for, after all.

The spell he was trying to cast would be better. The only thing it was missing was to truly follow the body; instead, it was an oval-shaped bubble. Great for a mage, not so great for a melee fighter. He’d modified it to be more suited to his combat style, but those changes meant a significantly higher mana drain, and while that was fine at higher Tiers, he simply couldn’t support it now. Not after the ritual.

[Debasement Resistance Initiated]

Serenity gumbled at himself while he continued building the spellform. That wasn’t good news at all. It was attacking a resistance he hadn’t even had. His Mind resistance was undoubtedly helping; in fact, it was probably why he’d gotten the new resistance so quickly.

It wasn’t all bad. At least he had the appropriate resistance now, even if it was terrible. That was always useful.

Serenity watched, unable to do anything other than finish the spell, as Rissa stumbled backwards out of the ritual circle. Rube was still unconscious and Russ seemed dazed; Serenity hoped he was fine.

He had to finish the spell, and it wasn’t something he could get away with using rote memory for. He needed to pay attention to the spellform and find where it was shielding against Essence-driven mental energy; that was likely the weak point, since the djinn seemed to use Essence freely. It was a guess, but a reasonable one, that those were the sections he should reinforce.

There were several places where the spell spun itself into knots manipulating Essence. Serenity was surprised when he realized that some of them were the difficult-to-make sections he’d had to practice for a long time, either horribly complex or requiring extreme precision, while others were simple, broad strokes; it didn’t seem to correlate with the complexity of the Essence portion of the spell, either.

He’d have to investigate that when he had more time, but for now all he could do was reinforce those sections, making them harder to damage, and generally boost the power of the Essence part of the spell. Serenity could see where the standard spell starved the Essence half to save on the mana cost; it made sense, since most magic was Mana-based. He could also see where there was a point for an Essence feed, similar to the Mana feed he usually used.

Had whoever designed the spell he used as the basis for his preferred personal shielding spell used both Mana and Essence? It certainly looked like it. It was one of the best shielding spells he’d ever found; perhaps that was why?

Questions for a later time. Serenity connected his Essence pool to the Essence input and continued the rest of the casting.

He felt an assault on the spell he’d Evoked and risked another moment of attention on something other than the spell; situational awareness was also vital. The spell was almost done, but he needed another half a minute or so after it was complete for it to stabilize before it would be at its best; the Evoked spell hadn’t had that chance, but he’d prepared it with that in mind; all it meant was that it would come down early.

There was a cloud of red and green mist above the vase. The green was mana-infused, while the red carried Essence. It sounded Christmasy, but the red was the deep red, almost black, of venous blood while the green was as much yellow as green, similar to the color on some fire engines. Serenity blinked twice before he realized that the colors were actually there, visible to everyone, and not just some weird bleed-over from his magical senses.

Rube lay where he’d passed out, but Rissa had clearly run around the area, grabbed her father, and pulled him to his feet. They stood several feet away from the circle; Rissa was looking back and forth between her father and Rube while Russ had a hand on his forehead and seemed to be fighting a headache, having trouble keeping his eyes open.

Serenity wanted to tell Rissa not to risk it, since the colored cloud wasn’t moving towards Rube and he didn’t want her to get its attention, but he needed to finish the spell first.

Serenity saw the cloud slam itself into the shield he’d Evoked. It shivered; it wouldn’t take too many more of those before it failed. He closed his eyes; he had to get the spell done first.

The spell flew together, but the final check seemed to take forever. Serenity knew better than to put out a spell where he hadn’t done the final check; that was just inviting failure.He concentrated and did one last pass, noting several suboptimal places he didn’t have time to fix and one glaring weakness that he took the time to turn into a trap, then pushed Mana and Essence into the spell. It snapped into place, shattering the remnants of the original shield.

It wouldn’t last long. He just had to hope it would last long enough.

Serenity opened his eyes. Not much had changed, except that the red-and-green cloud seemed to be trying to surround the shield instead of simply bashing it. That was a smart move on its part; many shields were set up to handle individual strikes better than continual pressure on all sides, including the one Serenity had established. It made him wonder if the creature had run into people who could shield before.

There were several ways to attack an incorporeal entity. Since this one was made of or at least carried by magic, his ax seemed like the best thing to try first. He pulled it off his Quick Belt and swept it through the area of the cloud.

There was a swath with no magic where the bit cut through it, but the magic-absorbing portion of the ax was small. The break in the green-and-red closed up with no sign that it had done any damage beyond removing some of the magic; it looked like there wasn’t any structure there to destroy.

Everything had at least some structure. Even his Sovereign of Potential form had structure; yes, it could separate and move around things, but it was hard on him to sustain it. He knew that a swath taken out of him would hurt like hell, though it wouldn’t be disabling in the same way as for a human. It would take a bit to truly hurt him like that.

Perhaps the same was true of the djinn?

Serenity struck again and again with the ax, attempting to target the most colorful sections he could find. Each stroke wiped away more of the djinn, but still more of it spewed from the vase. There had to be an end to it, but it might take a while. He just had to be careful to never let the ax blade cross his shield. It shouldn’t be that difficult.

It wasn’t difficult, but it did seem to take forever.

Ten minutes later, the shield was still holding up, even against the constant pressure; the fact that his swipes relieved some of the pressure helped a lot. His Mana and Essence were still holding out for the moment, but he wouldn’t last another ten minutes. He was fairly sure he was making progress; the smoke was thinner than before and the rents he tore in it were taking longer to close.

As he sliced his ax through the colorful smoke, impatiently waiting for it to give up and die already, a hint of red-and-green inside his shield caught his eye. He stopped waving the ax and looked for the colors. They glinted from his hand, where he held the ax-handle. It’d been in and out of the shield as he moved; that was normally safe, since unlike the ax, it didn’t absorb magic.

Apparently the djinn had its own plans. If he hadn’t seen it, he wouldn’t have noticed; he didn’t feel anything odd from his hand.

Until he did.

It went cold, then hot, then back to normal and he could feel the djinn attacking him directly. Unlike what was visibly happening to Rube, it didn’t feel like it was attacking his hand. Instead, it was attacking his spirit.

The words hid the oily, abhorrent undertone behind a seductive silken promise. There was one major problem with the approach: it wasn’t convincing at all for Serenity. Not only did he know that he wanted things other than power, he knew what was happening.

“No.” It wasn’t a debate, simply an answer. Serenity couldn’t use his ax inside the shield, and he couldn’t risk putting a hand outside the shield again, so he dropped the ax and duplicated one of the knives at his belt. He’d scrape the magic off his hand.

[Debasement Resistance Increased]