Inheritor Of Magic: The Magi King
Chapter 219 219 First Year Arrays

Wolfe was looking at the stack of arrows in the room when he got a brilliant idea. These were made with Earth magic, and that wasn't part of his skills, but why couldn't he add a spell to the bow directly to create an arrow when the spell was activated?

He could make them out of the Elements that he did know, and while they wouldn't be the same as solid arrows made of Earth Magic, and they would dispel after they hit the target, it should work just as well.

That was a complex array since it would involve a minimum of five different spells to achieve the effect that he wanted, but Wolfe thought that it might be worth trying.

Eventually, the humans would go away, and that would mean that the local villages would need to fend for themselves using whatever they had managed to capture during the winter's invasion.

Ideally, they were all aiming to get two years' worth of supplies out of this in case the humans didn't come back next winter, but that might not be possible. The units that were retreating simply didn't have enough with them for the villages to accumulate that much gear.

They would have lots of clothing and household goods since those lasted longer, but the food situation was always an ongoing concern, and they were using up a fair bit of ammunition to deal with the mundane army units that were moving back into the Frozen Wastes.

Not nearly as much as they were gathering, but it was still a loss that they would prefer not to have to suffer.

Wolfe's enchanted bullets were the only reason that they were getting ahead so far this year, but they wouldn't rely on him forever. Demons were powerful, and in their minds he had no particular reason to stay next to them other than the fact that he had made a Den there. A Den that he could rebuild in a matter of days anywhere else that he brought his witches.

So, they hoarded everything that they could while they could, and even the number of monsters in this region was beginning to drop noticeably over the last few days.

That shouldn't stop Priya from testing the new toys that he was making, Wolfe decided as he searched through his spellbook to get to the compound Arrays section.

Individual spells could be stacked and operate at the same time, but in an array, they required both less mana and less skill to activate. What he wanted was an Air Magic spell to push the arrow forward for a longer range, [Wind Blades] to cut into the target, [Lightning Bolt] to create the actual arrow, with a tweak to its activation to make it a solid object instead of dispersed energy, [Gravity Enhancement] to give the impact some oomph, and then a final layer to make it all work in the way that he wanted.

The final layers were a Magi specialty, and from what Wolfe could tell, the Element was simply Mana. There was no other aspect to it, and it would only affect spells as they were activating.

It was a strange sort of magic and one that it seemed nobody else could use, but it was the true secret behind the creation of arrays.

He didn't know the final Air magic spell that he needed, but it didn't take him long to replace it in the second-year section of the spells. It was a basic form of flying magic, and the spellbook called it [Paper Airplane Flight].

He would come up with a better name for it later, but Wolfe got the idea that they used it for exactly that purpose, having duels with paper airplanes when they were bored.

It was incredibly versatile, and if you focused, you could easily alter the path of the object you had enchanted. For a hunting arrow, that would be amazing. You could track the target and not have to rely entirely on skill.

There were a few nice compound bows in the collection of gear that the locals had collected for them, so it wasn't like he had a bad start. The gear was top of the line and had belonged to the Priya Coven, to begin with, for use by their front-line troops.

It took him a bit to scrub off the existing inscription on it, which was a mediocre fire enchantment that all such Coven-issued bows came with, and then he activated [White Board] and began working on the Array.

The spell book had warned him that every arrangement was a bit different, and it had a section on how the runes had to be altered to make separate Elements work together in an Array, but whoever had written the notes had severely understated the difficulty of learning this from scratch.

It took Wolfe six whole hours to get the spell to activate, and even then, it still suppressed half the spells so that they didn't activate at full efficiency.

He thought about it all through dinner and while he meditated that evening. With a fresh mind the next morning, Wolfe got back to the grind and worked until lunch to get the Array to activate completely.

When it finally did, Wolfe was stunned into speechlessness. The sense of power radiating from the temporary Array drawn on his magical board was immense and felt somewhat suffocating in its presence. It gave off a sense of danger even when not activated, and Wolfe had no idea why.

The best that he could do was arrange the Array onto the compound bow that he was working with and look for something to hunt.

Once it was drawn and inert on the bow, the sense of danger went away, so Wolfe decided that the effect must have been from drawing it with magic, which activated some small part of the array. Not enough to actually do anything, but enough to tell him that it was working, even without the sense of completion that a Magi got as their spells activated.

Now, to replace a target.