Overpowered Wizard

Holy shit.

The shade spiders were putting in the work!

Zarian had jumped from 545 to 615 TP in the time it took him to read the notifications. He hadn’t even planned on having a fast start, but his shade spiders were making sure he didn’t lag.

He was glad he’d worked on them consistently during his absolute training, getting them to advancement +2 despite how difficult that was.

We could probably stay here and send out waves upon waves of shade spiders, Para suggested via mind. With our abilities for efficient aura expenses and for recouping aura combined with the independence of each shade spider, we can theoretically do this until the end of the event.

Zarian wasn’t so sure. Wouldn’t that be lazy?

Para replied brilliantly. We would be more thorough this way! The shade spiders can be everywhere while we can’t. And if there is anything that’s too hard for our shade spiders to defeat, wouldn’t it be faster for us to go straight to the problem instead of wandering around?

Sensing Zarian’s remaining hesitance, Para stayed on the attack. We are weakened by the bloodline debuff for having fake personas, and your Lion Prince is making you feel less important, which makes me think the odds are against us. So, we must act smarter, not harder, and ensure outright victory.

Zarian chewed on Para’s argument and couldn’t find any faults in her rationale.

Sighing, Zarian conceded to Para’s point. “Whelp, I hope there are those who can beat my spiders. It’s a Super World, right? Must be greater than the usual Lesser World, so it ain’t an empty hope that’ll get Hopeland excited.”

“I’m sure we’ll find plenty of challenges we can address directly,” Para affirmed aloud.

With a nod, Zarian got to work by first examining his weaknesses.

The Darkrun Debuff felt like a 20% weakness across the board.

The Lion Prince debuff felt like he was unimportant and less fortunate. So maybe another 10% across the board, although that wasn’t a static debuff and might grow or shrink depending on the situation.

That left him at 70% of full capability.

Though that was not really true.

He wasn’t using his wizard hat, which reduced his capability closer to half. So he was probably around 50% of his natural power.

Most adventurers would’ve found that impossible to overcome. Zarian, however, had so many tools as the Sorcerer Prince that he’d already hatched a plan with his free evil +11 to break his own limitations.

First, he upgraded the wards with more rigorous and harder to breach and detect defensive magic. He used Ruvaria’s teaching to interconnect the wards, ensuring the power output and aura intake were balanced. That way, the wards would be long-lasting and greater than the sum of their parts.

Zarian’s camp became even more secure, harder to detect, and harder to approach without enough Willpower, Wonder, and/or Mysticism.

Then he placed down more aura-gathering arrays. But there was a limit to how many he could maintain.

Arrays had a tendency to wear out and break quickly once activated, and these aura-gathering arrays needed aura to draw more aura.

Being close to each other, ironically, made it more difficult to do their job, because they could draw on each other’s auras and weaken themselves. Zarian couldn’t scale that exponentially, but he didn’t really need that much either.

His 1310 Mysticism and Aura Transcendence were great enough to make shade spider production a simple endeavor, even if a consistently costly one. That, and he had a few other tricks up his sleeve, or specifically, in Para’s pocket dimension.

Zarian pulled out an irradiated cube the size of his head, a gift from Hannah. It was the closest thing Hannah could produce that was like a nuclear rod, but cube-shaped, while producing more energy than pure aura could.

It was a creation she’d stumbled upon while studying her own Aura Power Plant trait with her Cube Magic Queendom skill, which was an exciting accident. However, the Star System had immediately intervened, blocking Hannah from having practical uses for the cube other than it being nuclear.

That was the first time the Star System had limited Hannah directly, which made Ruvaria laugh once. Such an extremely unique occurrence had happened plenty of times to the Sorceress Queen and her ancestors, apparently.

Thus, Hannah had agreed to let go of pursuing serious nuclear magic applications until the Champion Ranks, which had mollified the Star System. That, of course, didn’t mean she wasn’t already drafting ideas for when they hit the Level 200s. And that didn’t mean she couldn’t create more nuclear cubes and pass them around.

Hence, Zarian having one that he could abuse the hell out of.

First, he wrapped the neon-green and irradiating cube in containment wards that slowed the magic leakage, protecting the vitality of himself and the others. As tough as he was, he wasn’t immune to nuclear magic radiation, so he still had to handle the shiny green cube with care.

Once sufficiently warded and secured, he formed tendrils of aura and sorcery to act as magic power cables, hooking the nuclear cube to him at the shoulders and ribs. Finally, he drew power from the nuclear cube a little at a time while letting one of his newest traits cycle the irradiated magic energy into pure aura.

<Aura Purification (Legendary): There’s aura in all things as long as you’re willing to search, filter, and purify. Magic being spent around you can be a great source of aura you can use to recover your aura faster. Doing so grants +150% Mysticism.>

The great part was the buff to Mysticism, which pushed his recovery rate even further, which also made every magic that scaled with Mysticism stronger. He also applied a tiny layer of void magic around himself to trigger other buffs and push his magical abilities higher and higher, which also raised his aura recovery rate.

Juiced to the gills, Zarian produced the next wave of shade spiders and found it laughably easy.

All at once, he raised a battalion of two thousand shade spiders and sent them all in one direction.

After waiting for a short time, he raised another two-thousand strong shade spider battalion and sent them in a different direction.

He repeated the process, sending battalions in four cardinal directions and the directions in between. The shade spiders moved quickly to back up the forward scouts, and once they went far enough, they broke down into smaller brigades, companies, and platoons of adventurous and battle-ready shade spiders.

The killing grew exponentially as they came across thicker and more dangerous pockets of monsters. The Tournament Points rapidly climbed up so fast Zarian got distracted by the numbers going brrrrrr and the happy juices buzzing through his brain.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Starlight,” he said.

“Yes, Isaiah?” The tails flicked amusingly.

“I am an undeserving recipient of your genius. How can I ever repay you?”

“Well … you can start by having those corpses sent our way. If you’re going to kill and gather points exponentially, I can exponentially eat and build my existential meatiness as high as I can.”

“How far can you push that?”

“There’s a limit depending on how much access to aura I have. Since we have no real aura limits while we’re like this, I’m going to stuff myself and be weightier than ever! And that should lead to making you physically greater, too!”

“Hell yeah. Let’s go!”

***

Bradley ‘Rocket’ Fitzgerald was contemplating if he and his companions should surrender their points to Isaiah.

They’d just finished conducting a final weapons check and inventory when he saw another battalion of cat-sized shadow spiders scurry out into the steamy jungle beyond the wards.

He’d lost count of how many Isaiah Skybreaker had summoned and sent out. Each time Bradley had seen those things scuttle by from up close, the well-trained drop trooper couldn’t stop himself from shuddering under his armor.

The spiders didn’t seem like much at first glance, but each one had a potent power to them that was unsettling. They also dressed in shadowy cosplay with swords, shields, wizard hats, knives, little instruments, and more, like they were part of a massive nerd convention.

Why the hell were the ‘musician’ spiders equipped with little flutes and drums and lutes while going out merrily in the sweaty jungle?

Bradley had come from a version of Earth that was further into the future. It had the super soldier and space-faring technology that was once a thing of Science Fiction.

When he and his companions had passed through a portal during a drop mission and became Outsiders in the Infinita Star System Universe, they stuck to what they knew and infused magic with their gear and weaponry.

Each of them had picked up some crafting abilities to maintain their gear and steadily advance their stuff at their levels.

For a while, their team of four had looked like hot shit in their corner of the Infinita Star System. They’d saved kingdoms from barbaric attackers and had princesses throw balls and celebrations for the armored heroes. And they’d made it all look easy, as easy as a pull of a trigger.

The fun had died down after the Darkrun Apocalypse happened followed by all the scary cosmic rumors spread about by diviners and those who communed with the gods closely.

When Bradley had heard about the Carrowmore Tournament and the likelihood of the Dark Lord – now called the Dark Emperor – showing up there, he and his boys had taken it upon themselves to check things out. They’d thought themselves capable of hitting the Dark Emperor with some holy grenades and a sealing trap to put that bastard away for a long time.

Then they’d ended up at Carrowmore and got surrounded by so many powerful creatures, the confidence Bradley and his companions had going in got crushed.

The last five days of getting caught up in the Carrowmore madness had rocked their foundations further. Especially when they’d ended up under Madeline’s charm, which had Rocket’s stomach still roiling with disgust at the thought of how she twisted his mind, his feelings, and made him feel lesser.

Madline was dead now, and her killer was sitting in the air, legs folded like some powerful monk deity. The killer and consumer of human flesh had a neon green cube that Bradley swore was the magical equivalent of a fucking nuclear core floating above his head.

There were shimmering scripts and symbols wrapped tightly around the cube. Tendrils of green power that were connected to Isaiah changed into another magical substance that seemed like pure aura to Bradley.

How the fuck? Bradley couldn’t wrap his mind around what he was seeing. Who was this Isaiah Skybreaker guy really? Was this what it took to face the Dark Emperor and The Dragoness?

Bradley was stunned, his Willpower cracked and slow to recover. Whenever he thought he could get a grip on himself, another two thousand freaky shadow spiders rose from the shade under the jungle plants and marched out.

And if that wasn’t scary enough, the sky rained corpses of many creatures Bradley could vaguely describe, each one mutilated and wrapped in black magic webbing. The webbed corpses didn’t even fall far before getting snapped up by one of nine giant blue fox tails.

Each snappy tail slavered, slurped, crunched, and outright devoured the corpses in less than a second before reaching out to snap out another one.

It was … a whole meat grinder.

More and more corpses rained from the air, dropped by something vaguely dark and terrifying, and the tails ate faster and faster. They munched gleefully while making even louder smacking sounds or voicing their pleasure of the constant feast.

“Delicious!” growled the so-called Starlight. “So much new food. All enriched by a Super World. Feed me more, Isaiah. Feed me more!”

Isaiah laughed, sounding unhinged and dark. “Alright, Starlight, alright. Anything for you.”

Bradly felt a sudden fullness in his bladder. He tried his best to keep it contained.

“Rocket?” called Turret. “What’s our next move?”

Arty and Shield stood awkwardly in wait for a command.

Bradley looked from his boys to the monstrous ‘fox devil’ who could wipe out the drop troopers without even trying.

“We’re surrendering to Isaiah. This ain’t for us.” Bradley pretended not to notice the relief the others showed through their drop armor.

Being the leader meant it was up to Bradley to make the hard calls, and some of those hard calls required him to eat humble pie for the sake of his men.

At the very least, they would return to their original world with some legendary gear that they’d got for a steal, so it wasn’t all a complete loss. He would just have nightmares for a while after having someone fuck with his head and puppet his body. And from seeing a fox devil and his gluttonous man-eating tails handle nuclear energy like it was child’s play while sending out an endless army of cosplay shadow spiders.

Decision made, Bradley and the others moved carefully toward Isaiah to surrender their points to him and head home.

Unfortunately, something thunderous and stormy interrupted them with a triumphant roar. Thick cords of lightning lashing the ground and sent the drop troopers scrambling backward.

Standing at the center of the commotion was the dvergr guy, Valin, who wielded two legendary hammers in each hand. With eyes filled with lightning, he made a thunderous boast.

“ISAIAH SKYBREAKER! I challenge you!”

“Is he a freaking idiot?” Shield asked. “Isaiah can crush all of us!”

“I like his moxie, though,” Turret said.

“No, something’s different!” Arty claimed.

“What do you mean?” Bradley asked.

“I’m scanning the dvergr. It’s as if Valin jumped into a new quality of power. No. Almost like two qualities of power! It’s to the point that I can’t scan it fully!”

Rocket cursed. That bastard Valin had hid his true power the whole time. The dvergr was probably mythical, which meant the drop troopers were way too close to the action!

Cutting through the noise of a sudden power up, a dark and creepy laughter filled the warded area. Something about that laugh made Bradley want to piss himself and beg for his life.

“I want to be merciful, Valin,” Isaiah said casually. “But I’ll stop holding back if you interrupt Starlight’s meal. She’s sensitive about that.”

“I will not hesitate to suck the flesh off your bones, Valin,” Starlight warned. “Take this opportunity to leave. We can always fight later.”

“I can make good use of those bones. But I would rather you head home safe and sound, Valin. Please, accept the mercy.”

Bradley considered himself a proud man, but Isaiah’s horrifying nature was undeniable. Even the way he offered mercy sounded sinister. Bradley took the only option available, turning and retreating with his friends.

And Valin kept digging his grave.

“NAY! I will accept nothing less than to face you here and now, Isaiah! You say you wish to overcome The Dragoness and the Dark Emperor? So do I?! You say mercy? I say cowardice! Now face me, Isaiah Skybreaker, and let me show you the grand powers I’ve held in secret for many years! All it would take is one hit!”

“I won’t even give you one hit,” Isaiah declared.

“We’ll see about that!”

Like an explosion of thunder and lightning and air-shaking magic, the fighting began, with Valin striking first.

Dozens of jungle trees got torn from the roots and clods of fresh jungle earth went splattering everywhere, raining down all over the running drop troopers.

Bradley urged his guys to move faster, use their physical abilities for extra speed, and get the hell out of there as Valin fought like some jacked-up thunder demigod.

Yet, throughout that powerful display, Isaiah’s voice remained clear with a sinister bent.

“It hasn’t been long, Valin, but I will remember you as a fun fellow every time I look upon your skeleton.”

Bradley pissed himself midrun, but he didn’t stop. He kept going. His men ran harder with him. They left the warded camp far behind them and passed further devastation where shade spiders slaughtered monsters wholesale with their great and dark powers.

Bradley and his friends passed through countless parties and platoons and companies of the spiders, hoping beyond hope they wouldn’t attack, hoping beyond hope the spiders would just let him and his troopers through.

The spiders let them run. But the chilling fear of Isaiah treating a Powered-Up Valin like an easy match stayed with Bradley. No matter how far he and his friends ran in the Super World of Steam, Jungles, and Claws.