บท 63: Flame Shield
Even though he had now found a way to barely defend against the attacks of the vine. He was still to slow with his shield. Despite trying to position it in the best way, he couldn't avoid getting even more injured.
Besides that he used up his mana and mental energy at a high rate. But even so he only managed to slightly char the vine. After blocking more than ten attacks from the vine he hadn't even managed to inflict any real injuries on it, while his strength was slowly reducing, because of the blood flowing out of his wounds.
Realizing that he couldn't continue like that his first thought was to check if Vlada could help him deal with the vine, but she too was in an unfavorable situation.
As such he could only decide to withdraw. He informed Vlada and then decisively moved outside of the range of the vine.
"Damn, I really need a way to deal with this vine."
Even though he could easily avoid it, in his opinion it would be a very bad idea to do it. After all if he couldn't even defeat a simple vine, how was he supposed to clear this level then.
Now that he wasn't being attacked he had the time to think of a way.
For that he first thought about his experiences during the fight. The first thing that stood out was his new way of using the Flame Shield. Even though it was much smaller, after he had compressed it, it was much more sturdy too.
"I need to be able to move it around faster, so I should take the time to train moving it around. Besides that it would be great if I could have multiple Compressed Flame Shields at the same time, but I fear that will use up to much mana and mental energy."
"But that would only make sure I can defend myself. Besides that I need something to attack, or I won't be able to ever defeat this stupid vine."
His first thought was to use a flame based attack, like Flame Arrows. He had seen description of it in some basic books. But after a short period of contemplation he threw away this idea. There was no way he would have enough mana to do it this way.
"The best way would be to combine defense and offense. But how could I archive it?"
Combining defense and offense into one was difficult. Even though his Compressed Flame Shield could defend, it was incapable of attacking. And if he tried he would be defenseless during this time.
"Hmm, how can I combine them?"
Finally he thought of something, "My sword!"
All the time he had used his sword to attack and defend, so it was a obvious starting point.
"But my sword was useless during the last fight. I could neither use it to block, nor to attack. Only the flames from the Compressed Flame Shield did anything to the vine."
"My sword can attack and defend and my Compressed Flame Shield can damage the vine. How about I combine them?"
As soon as this idea came to him he then proceeded to try it out.
For that he tried to wrap the Compressed Flame Shield around the blade of his sword. But as soon as the flame got close to the blade, the complete sword heated up and the he hurriedly aborted his try. He only had this one sword and it would be horrible if he damaged it.
"This won't work. I need to keep the heat away from the blade or it will melt the sword. If only I had a higher grade sword. I'm sure it would be able to withstand much higher temperatures and maybe even be able to isolate the heat."
He hadn't played around much with flames made by mana except for his Flame Shield and for pill refining, so he didn't have any good idea at first. As such he decided to first recuperate and then think about it again.
After finishing recuperating he once again thought about the problem. It couldn't be that hard to stop the flames from heating up the sword right?
He once again thought about all the methods he knew, that could isolate something. Sadly that weren't many, or to be exact it was only one and that was the mana sphere he used for pill refining.
Maybe he could create a mana sphere around the blade and then wrap the Compressed Flame Shield around it.
Not wanting to waste any more time he started his experiment, but then hurriedly stopped.
"That was close. What if it failed and I lost my sword.", he couldn't help but scold himself for being so thoughtless.
"Hm, since I only need the form, it should be feasible to use a wooden sword as a base."
He then proceeded to make some wooden swords to practice with.
Unsurprisingly, the first few tries failed miserable, since his mana sphere wasn't stable enough. Since the form was different it was much more difficult to make it stable enough.
After a while he finally managed to get rid of all the small problems with the mana sphere, which now had the form of the blade of his sword and not a sphere.
Besides that he had to experiment a bit with another mana sphere so that the heft and grip of the sword wasn't influenced by the flames.
Without him noticing a few hours had passed and even though his Magic Power hadn't increased significantly, he now had much better control over his mana as well as his mental energy. This resulted in him having to use much less of them than before, to produce the same effect.
As such even though his absolute amount hadn't increased much, in reality he could now do much more with it.
Realizing this he decided to invest more time into training his control. Before he had neglected this and only concentrated on increasing his stats.
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