23 - Sphinx Hunting

The Axel kingdom was in a desert to begin with, and that didn't change past its borders. There was a long stretch of land in a certain region near the kingdom where it was said that sphinxes showed up relatively often. Not too often, of course, but sometimes.

It was a forbidden grounds that was registered as unclaimed territory not belonging to any given nation.

Heading there would only take maybe a day or less at my level, but I didn't want to spend all day running, so I took a carriage till we got close, which took 2 months instead.

Bidding the coachman goodbye, I took a deep breath and steeled myself.

Although I could defeat it in just a few dozen breaths, so too could it kill me just as easily.

I needed to be on guard and take this seriously.

Ixtra was also much weaker than me now, so he wouldn't be of too much help.

I had thought about summoning greater demons, who were said to be as strong as the class blood stage, but I didn't want to risk all the problems that came with summoning demons, moral ones being the least of them.

Getting down low to the ground, I got in a sprint-ready position. Priming my body, I used a variety of magic spells at my feet, and pushed against the ground with all my force.

In the next moment, a sonic boom sounded as I rapidly accelerated beyond the speed of sound in an instant.

Controlling my body that was flying forward, I cast spell circles at my feet and stepped on them to redirect my course and stabilize myself.

This might seem simple, but anyone below the 7th circle could not do this.

A mage of a given circle meant being able to use that many circles simultaneously. I was already casting magic to speed myself up. The spell for conjuring magic circles that were tangible and able to be stepped on and grappled onto was [Hangtime], and it was a 2nd circle spell. However, the spell for a magic circle that moved with you, but could also be stepped on, was a 3rd circle spell, [Airstep].

A 6th circle mage would have their hands full if they cast [Airstep] on both feet at once, and even just one foot at a time would mean only casting 3rd circle magic for speed, attack, or anything else.

For reference, I was now a 10th circle mage, so I was using a mix of 2 agility spells, a 1st and 6th circle one, alongside one [Airstep].

This also meant if one wanted to cast their strongest spell, they'd have to do so without any other magic to help them. No defensive magic, no movement or agility, nothing. It left them quite weak and vulnerable, so this was not the combat style most mages chose to adopt.

If I wasn't aiming to be a magic swordsman but rather just a knight, I could replace a lot of my skills, and replace one of them with a skill for speed. This is how all the classes stay balanced.

Still, most classes learn some magic somewhere along the line, so knights were considered one of the strongest classes in the beginning, since it was easy to train, but worse than other classes in the class blood stage due to lack of spells.

This was not the case in the void magic stage, however.

At the void magic stage, a knight could progress to certain other classes, all of which could use some form of magic. The base progression was to a "paladin", who could use holy and light magic, and some others. It completely was equal in strength to other classes.

One might ask what the point was of training for a hybrid class like magic swordsman if knights could just train more simply and be just as strong once becoming paladins.

The answer was that there was usually no point. Most people did not go for hybrid classes. The only reason I did was that I had had a scuffed start due to the backwards techniques present in the Nyla kingdom, so I was already a knight and a mage before ever learning of proper class progression. I thought I might as well keep going with it at that point.

Otherwise, I would have certainly become a pure mage. They were the most versatile after all.

This might be a good time to mention what exactly made a class.

Once I got to the void magic stage, my blood would become of a certain type. I would no longer be able to learn certain skills, and be unable to cast certain spells without a lot of effort and difficulty.

Other things would become easier, and the progression thereafter would continue to diverge from other classes, although certain general themes still stuck around.

I would no longer be able to pivot to another class, and my skill slots up until that point would also be fixed with the skills I had in them at that point.

There was a lot that happened that differentiated people into specific groups, and people came to call these groups classes.

A knight would progress past a knight at the void magic stage, so the "knight" class was a unique class that only existed prior to the void magic stage. Still, it was a class, since not following the proper knight advancement methods would result in being unable to become, say, a paladin for instance.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

The 10th circle was the limit of the blood class stage for mages.

There were a lot of different reasons that all came together to cause this, that I won't go into here.

What I will go into here, however, is how I was still flying forward atop the desert sands, with steady and controlled "flight".

Technically, a 2nd circle mage could cast [Hangtime] and "fly", albeit just barely and without moving. If they moved, they'd have to become proficient at jumping from the magic circles they were on, releasing them, and then casting [Hangtime] again while moving through the air, and then landing on the newly cast [Hangtime] magic circles.

It wasn't that hard, but it took some getting used to, and looked pretty impressive when done multiple times in quick succession.

Of course, going faster than the speed of sound was far more impressive.

I kept that up for a while, twisting around the desert in wide arcs, almost skating across the surface it looked like.

Suddenly, maybe 2 hours later, I saw one.

A sphinx.

A giant, lumbering mass of sand colored fur, kicking up the sand underneath it wherever it stepped. It had a human face despite being a beast, but I already knew about that so I wasn't surprised for long.

It still felt weird to see it in person though. It was even a pretty face.

However, there seemed to be a glint of aggression and violence hidden in the depths of its eyes, waiting to show itself.

I didn't attack immediately.

Not only would a sneak attack be a good opportunity to get a lot of damage in, but I could prepare a 10th circle attack in the process. Combined with my base proficiency due to my aura and skills, I might even be able to take it down with one move.

However, beyond that, there was something else too.

I had to kill who knew how many of these things to get the skill, [Basic Chaotic Mana Absorption].

I decided to follow it for a while to see if it met any other sphinxes. It took 2 hours to find this one. Who knew how long it'd take to find the next?

An hour later, I lost my patience and attacked.

I used a 10th circle spell as planned, called [10th Chaser].

Turns out, that last spell in that sealing magic book that taught me sealing magic up to the 7th circle, [7th Chaser]? Well, turns out that spell had been part of a series, from [1st Chaser] to [10th Chaser].

It was assumed it went further in the void magic stage, but no-one knew.

I had found this out in a book in the royal library, which detailed the entire spell series.

The [Chaser] series of spells had a lot of uses based on how you wanted to use them, and they got more uses the higher the tier.

[1st Chaser] could only do basic sealing, sealing movement, sealing magic and aura. That was it. It didn't even seal skills, or any kind of power not based on mana, like demonic energy.

In comparison, [10th Chaser] was overpowered.

It could seal almost anything, and worked on a variety of forms of energy.

In this case, I cast [10th Chaser] at the sphinx and managed to completely stop its movements, mana, and all, before launching a full strength sword beam at its neck.

The attack created a large gash, and blood flooded out like a dam breaking.

The sphinx cried out in immense pain, unresolved about the sudden ambush.

'Brother human, you are already so strong. Do you really still need to ambush little old me?'

The sphinx didn't have the energy to do so right now but it was, in spirit, punching air.

I managed to launch one more max power sword beam before jumping into the air and hanging there with [Hangtime], to escape the onslaught of the massive river of blood that suddenly dyed the land crimson.

I had to release [10th Chaser] to cast the [Hangtime] circles, but the sphinx was already too weak to do anything now. It was close to dying outright.

'Ok, so, not quite one attack. Or even 2. It really is quite tough. I almost feel bad. No wait, I think I do feel a little bad...'

Shaking my head slightly, I focused and launched some more blade beams, this time not with [10th Chaser] but the 8th circle spell, [Mythril Slasher], which would allow one to cut cleanly through a large block of mythril. It was a fortification spell, and I imbued it into my attack before launching more blade beams.

I had to be careful of running out of mana too, but I would be fine for now.

Of course, the sphinx was much larger than a mere block of mythril, and its bones in particular were even as strong as mythril. Even with [Mythril Slasher], it took a lot of attacks to get to and through the bone.

Thankfully l, it died partway through, so I could relax and take my time with it after that. Well, not for too long. I didn't have to but I'd rather store the thing away if I could.

So without missing a beat, I threw the golden key onto the corpse and willed the whole thing to go into a 2nd floor container.

If it didn't work and made a mess on the first floor of the warehouse, I had already prepared and moved everything else away momentarily.

Thankfully, that was unnecessary as it did in fact work exactly as I wanted it to.

In the 2nd floor, there was one more treasure now, making the number [14/1000].

Messing around with the console for the corpse, I got sent into a space.

It wasn't like Jackal's lab, which was I guess registered as a location, so I got sent into it directly.

This time, I was in a starkly white space with thin lines in the air that seemed to do nothing and weren't tangible.

It was like they were only there to judge distance or something.

In front of me in the white space was the sphinx corpse, except the blood was no longer flowing out. The whole thing, in fact, seemed frozen in time.

I understood that the treasury was sealing it somehow to preserve the corpse. At least, that was my best guess, and what I felt was likely an accurate one.

Walking up to it, I cast a scanning magic to find its mana crystal, and then gashed open its stomach with a large wound with my sword, before conjuring a large hand with a spell and ripping the mana crystal out of the sphinxes dead body.

It felt very gruesome. No, it was very gruesome.

I once again marveled at the utility of spellcraft.

Looking up, I was amazed at the sheer size of the crystal.

It was even larger than the red mana crystal in Jackal's lab.

I had been wondering why there had been such a large red mana crystal, said to only be found in hell, in Jackal's lab, since this realm wasn't Hell.

It was only then that I understood that Jackal had probably summoned a demon purely to kill it for its mana crystal, presumably for powering his lab.

Now that I thought about it, it didn't have to be a sphinx I got the mana crystal from. Although I didn't know if red mana crystals would cause problems, at the very least, if there were a method to summon strong creatures at the sphinx's level who had blue mana crystals, I wouldn't have to worry about spending so much time finding them.

'Who knows if there are even enough sphinxes left alive for what I need anyhow.'

I went through my memories but remembered no summoning techniques for such high level creatures. Since that was the case, I don't know how Jackal did it. It wasn't in any of the books in his lab, as far as I remembered.

So, I guess I'd just have to keep hunting. But, at the very least, I had realized with this that I didn't just need to hunt sphinxes.

Meanwhile, since skills generally required constant exposure to the activity that causes one to learn the skill, taking long breaks wasn't recommended.

Thus, it would be better to obtain a whole bunch of large magic crystals, these ones that were ~50 meters tall/long, before attempting to absorb the chaotic mana within them day in and day out.

So, I decided to search for more sphinxes, and other strong creatures, for now, instead of hurrying to absorb the one large mana crystal I had just obtained.

'I hope they don't go extinct or something. If there is a sphinx god, please forgive me.'