The crawler was now sleeping in a magically reinforced pit behind the academy tent. Nira had assigned two farmers and one very judgmental goat as rotating guards. Jin wasn't sure whether the goat's presence was symbolic or just petty vengeance from Professor Beakley.
Either way, Jin was still shaking. Not from fear anymore—but exhilaration.
He'd fought. Not just flailed or stalled—but fought using nothing but shapes, chalk, and a lot of shouting. And it had worked.
Sitting at his bench, he redrew each part of the battle, refining the sigils and chiseling them into polished slate tiles. This wasn't just experimentation anymore.
These were spells.
"You need names," he muttered, squinting at the gravity-twisting diagram. "Something cool. Something that sounds like it belongs in a scroll shouted dramatically from a rooftop."
Nira, sitting nearby with a basket of emberfruit, tilted her head. "You name spells?"
"Of course. It's tradition! Otherwise I have to yell, 'Do the swirly push thing' in a fight."
She considered this. "That… not efficient."
"Exactly."
He pointed to the first tile—a compressed spiral enclosed within a hexagon, symbolizing directional distortion.
Name: Spiral Vector Lock
Effect: Temporarily reverses momentum or disorients directional force. In simpler terms, it can flip a charging target or make it misstep mid-attack.
"Great for throwing monsters off their rhythm," Jin said.
Nira nodded. "Also good for prank."
Jin smiled. "Mental note."
The second sigil had been his basic repulsion glyph—three open triangles pointing outward with a circle at the center.
Name: Force Pulse Arc
Effect: Mid-range shockwave, pushes objects or creatures backward in a cone. Good for defense, terrain shaping, or dramatic cape flourishes.
"I used this right when the thing lunged," Jin said. "It doesn't do damage, but it's like being shoved by a very sassy invisible boulder."
Nira scribbled down a quick sketch and added a smiling stick figure flying through the air.
"Accurate," Jin said.
The third spell was trickier. It was the last-minute binding glyph he'd used once the crawler was stunned: a square lattice with interwoven spirals, designed for anchoring movement.
Name: Rooted Frame Seal
Effect: A containment spell. Temporarily restricts movement inside the seal and slows mana flow within the target's boundary. Also helpful for storing squirmy baskets of apples, apparently.
"It's not permanent," Jin said, "but in a pinch, it'll hold most mid-size creatures. Maybe even Nira if she drinks sugarwater again."
"I was curious!" she barked, mock-defensive.
He chuckled and added one more:
Name: Glide Shell
Effect: A quick protective barrier made from a triangle-folded light curve, designed to deflect physical impact from one direction—like a monster's charge. It had saved his ribs, so it earned its spot.
That afternoon, Jin held an impromptu "Spell Naming Ceremony" in front of his students. Most of them were still learning to float stones or boil water with glyphs, but hearing their teacher describe combat-use runes with names and diagrams sparked something new:
Aspiration.
He wrote the spell names on the academy slate board, in both village script and his own hybrid runes. Below it, he scrawled:
"We name what protects us. We remember what saves us."
Nira added a line beneath:
"And we teach what keeps others whole."
That night, the villagers lit a small fire by the well to celebrate Jin's return. The air was filled with the smell of roasted rootcakes and emberfruit cider. Someone brought out a flute rune. Someone else used a wind glyph to add accompaniment. Beakley danced.
Jin stood by the edge of the clearing, watching the stars peek over the trees.
He hadn't just survived.
He'd built tools.
He'd shared them.
And now, his magic—his geometry—had a voice.
And monsters would learn to listen.
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The crawler had been unconscious for two days.
It slept in a reinforced pen—half rune-seal, half chicken coop—behind the academy, guarded round the clock by two volunteers, one nervous goat, and a rotating schedule of Jin's braver students. Nira named it Splish, "because it sounds like something that falls in a swamp and smells worse after."
Jin wasn't convinced it could understand language. But it definitely understood eyes. It watched them from the shadows now, slow-blinking and silent, no longer hostile… just waiting.
The villagers kept their distance, except for one—the village tanner, Grema, who approached with a clipboard made from bark and purpose.
"Not native," she said, running a gloved hand along the crawler's dull green scales.
Jin blinked. "Wait, you mean not from this area?"
Grema nodded. "Mountains, forest—usually clean of this. Valthuun keeps wildlands calm. This one?" She tapped a claw with a stick. "Wrong texture. Desert sheen. Coastal mud beneath claw tips."
Jin leaned closer. Now that she mentioned it, the crawler's body wasn't weathered like most forest creatures. Its claws were chipped like it had been clambering over stone. Its eyes were lighter—more used to sun.
"It came from outside the Wyrm's range."
Grema squinted. "Far."
That meant something had pushed the crawler out of its own ecosystem… or lured it toward Lenth.
Jin studied the scar near its back leg. Faint burn marks. Deliberate—magical, perhaps.
"I think it was chased here," he said.
Grema raised an eyebrow. "By what?"
That, Jin didn't know.
But that night, as he sat at his desk sketching out an upgrade to Force Pulse Arc, his mind wandered. What if this crawler hadn't come by accident? What if something beyond the snake's protective range had changed?
A shift. A tear. A flicker in the balance that drove even weak monsters into old, sleeping lands.
He pulled out a fresh slate and began carving:
Spell Concept: Hollow Compass Function: Detect directional mana displacement. Visualizes arcane fields bending unnaturally—whether by spell, artifact… or creature.
They were going to need it.
Because if the little monsters were starting to slink toward Lenth, who knew what might slither behind them?