Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3) by John Gold (novel24 TXT) 📕

Kirk looks at me for a second before it occurs to him.

“Oh, you’re the keeper of the tree! Okay, the search will take quite a while. I’ll tell all my spirits to look for the girl or information about her, though it could even take months if she isn’t in Radaam. The spirits will check everywhere…everyone…”

“I get it, no need for the details. And my second request: can you help me transform my mental body into a mind mage?”

“Are you crazy? They’ll catch us, kick us out of the academy, destroy our reputations, and probably even throw us out of the city!”

“All you need to do is make sure nobody finds out. I’m a life mage; you’re a mind mage. We both have the transformation spells, so all we have to do is perform the transformation without making any extra noise.”

“I want tickets to tomorrow’s battles at the arena.”

“Buying you out of your fears is cheap. You have a deal.”

He’s going through some surprising emotions—elation, fear, enjoyment, and even pride.

“I trust you. Well, that, and I wanted to ask you the same thing. You know I picked mind mage for both my specialties, and I don’t have any modifications for my mental body. Also, the tickets are pretty expensive. Tomorrow, Gaea, the Lady of Wands, will be fighting for the title of grandmaster. She’s tried almost twenty times, but she always fails.”

I don’t need sleep, so we spend the whole night modifying Kirk’s body. Eleven hours later, we’ve gotten to the sixth level, but that’s when we have to head over to the arena. The first level takes just half an hour; the fifth, already two and a half. Modifying the body for the tenth level takes five hours. We decide to modify my body tomorrow night.

This battle is much harder than all the previous ones. My opponent is a life mage with an already-modified body—a battle mage. He knows how to fight in close, too, though not as well as me.

It ends up in a struggle between body amplification and instant regeneration. The mage’s face is quite something as I lock a suffocating grip around him.

The response is an enormous boulder that smacks into my head. It’s followed by a duster, a granite shield, and even a golem. I’m a little nervous, seeing as how my resistance to physical damage is only so-so, and there’s a golem coming at me. Thankfully, my opponent is a poor mind mage, and the golem is weak. His mana spent, he dies, unable to heal his wounds. There were two ways of beating him: doing one fatal blow or waiting for his mana to run out. I picked the latter option and won.

You are now a tenth-level life mage.

Life Magic spell effectiveness: +50%

You can pick a second specialty.

Kirk wasn’t lying—the tickets cost a thousand gold a piece. That’s a third of an office clerk’s salary! I’m not sure what could be so wonderful about Gaea to drive the cost up so high.

The student battles are held on the practice arena, while title battles are held in the Coliseum. This is ridiculous! The gladiators pay for the duel, the spectators pay for the tickets, and even the Coliseum pays taxes. And Lunar makes money off them all!

I have my perception boosted so high that I’m able to take a close look at the face of the girl coming from the left side of the stadium. It turns out that I saw her six years ago in the Silvana Swamp. Her fighting style hasn’t changed in the least—she still carries around two bags  out of which magic wands peep.

The battle begins as soon as the two fighters step into the ring. It’s a master swordsman against an air mage. The girl pulls wands out one after another, not letting her opponent gather himself. One hand slips behind her back, the other dips into the bag at her waist. Each of the wands are inlaid with jewels. Mana storage, not battle wands. I watched her switch them out for each other last time, too. She must have put all her attribute points into intellect to boost the damage she does.

One of the wands creates a barrier in the path of the swordsman or tries to hold him back, as he’s making an effort to get in close to the girl. An amulet saves him from most of her spells. For now, the girl is saved by swamps and earth shields that make the swordsman go around them, though there’s a cloud forming and flashing over her head. She’s charging a dozen wands that are currently lying around her feet, and the spell isn’t ready yet.

“Kirk, what is she doing? Why isn’t she attacking him with everything she has?”

Everyone looks up at the enormous, threatening cloud in the sky.

“She picked up the storm dragon ability. It’s a semi-living creature made entirely out of lightning. She picked the same specialty four times as she was getting mage titles, boosting her strength in that area.”

A snake winds out of the cloud looking more like a whiskered dragon. The hair on my body stands up, I smell something in the air, and I realize there’s a bolt of lightning coming that I definitely wouldn’t be able to survive.

The snake starts to circle, looking for the best moment to attack. Seeing that, the swordsman summons two large, six-legged golems and uses a granite shield. Stone is a good dielectric, and that dome might be enough to block the bolt of lightning. Gaea creates a swamp right under the dome, and the storm dragon is closing in. One golem covers its master and takes part of the charge. Even with its resistance, it crumbles a second later. But when Gaea uses a tsunami spell to