This would be so much easier if there wasn’t all this other mana around, Velik thought to himself as he triggered the trap for the fiftieth time. Mana flashed out of nowhere, crawling out of whatever hiding place it had, and formed the platform to throw him into the air again. Dutifully, Velik dodged out of the way.

He’d accepted that he couldn’t see the trap. He just didn’t understand why. There was nothing there, and then, impossibly, there was. That didn’t make sense, of course, so he reasoned that the only logical explanation was that the trap was always there and somehow hiding itself. The mana was so thick in the necropolis, however, that he was having trouble isolating the magical trap itself.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s just camouflage for the trap. It was there the whole time, hiding in the bushes, waiting for me to walk by so it could leap out and sink its teeth in me. But why this one, and none of the other traps? Those were all obvious.

Presumably it took more skill or had a greater cost associated with it. Or maybe it just couldn’t be placed anywhere else. The mana was thicker here, denser. Placing a deer blind in the middle of a field didn’t do much to hide it. In the same way, a hidden magical trap might not be viable in a place with less ambient mana.

Sure, let’s go with that. It doesn’t really matter either way. The point is figuring out how to spot them.

Finding something without seeing it was an old lesson for any experienced hunter. The trick was simple in theory, difficult in execution. It was all about noticing the signs. Many predators, especially monsters, could hide themselves quite effectively. What they tended to fail at hiding were the footprints made in soft dirt, or the shedding of fur on the ground. Rubbing up against tree bark or stone sometimes left evidence behind.

The problem was that Velik didn’t know what signs to look for when it came to magic. He was hoping that he could figure a few of them out, and that it would lead to some sort of progress with [Mana Sight] and [Mana Scent].

Hours passed unnoticed as Velik examined and tested the trap from every angle. He figured out the limits of its trigger radius, and even how it managed to only lift him instead of crushing the rows of pews nearby when it went off. That actually helped a lot with testing, since it turned out that the initial platform was directly under his feet, and it expanded into something thirty feet wide only after it got up off the floor.

In theory, if he moved fast enough, he could get out of the way of the much smaller initial platform before it expanded. Unfortunately, even at the speed he moved, that wasn’t really possible. The trap’s trigger was too well calibrated to allow for it. He did discover that a long jump through the air would let him bypass the crushing platform completely, however.

“You!” a voice snapped from the back side of the cathedral’s main hall, interrupting Velik’s experiments with the trap. “You took me by surprise, but you won’t be so lucky this time.”

He glanced up and saw one of the two liches he’d killed floating in the air, black robes drifting around skeletal feet wrapped in rotting, gray flesh. Its hands were hidden in the folds of its sleeves, and the hood was pulled low over its skull. Some sort of magic shielded its face, leaving only two red glowing pinpricks for its eyes visible in the darkness.

A staff floated next to it, unsupported in the air. Magic shimmered up and down its length, coursing through it and building up in the crimson orb clutched in a stylized claw at the top. The orb itself was a smooth ball of glass, though presumably far stronger. Even as the lich ranted, the magic finished building up, and a scorching hot ray of fire lanced out in Velik’s direction.

Huh. What’s that? he wondered as he dodged to the side. The fire had pulled on the ambient mana as it slipped through it, and the disruption to the flow pattern had revealed something Velik hadn’t noticed before.

There was a whole other layer of mana beneath what he could see, the water hiding below the scum floating on top of the pond. As soon as he realized it, it was obvious that there was more than what could be seen on the surface. He’d just never considered it before, and no one had ever mentioned it to him. He could only assume everyone else had found it so obvious, they hadn’t realized he didn’t know.

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That was a thought to ponder later. The other lich was also back, having somehow come in from outside the cathedral in an attempt to hit Velik from both sides. He skirted around the trapped area, thankful that he’d taken the time to familiarize himself with the main hall. That was the only trap there, and he knew exactly where it was safe to walk.

The lich at the back was the one who threw out fire and ice attacks. Its counterpart seemed to favor air and earth, which was a particularly difficult combination to dodge. Velik had won the last time by virtue of overwhelming force and speed, and he saw no reason to change that strategy now.

He blurred across the cathedral, leaping pews and actually running several steps horizontally across a wall to dodge a set of spikes that suddenly jutted up in front of him. The other lich conjured up a layer of ice to force him off the wall, but Velik simply twisted into a side flip and pulled on the [Air Walk] enchantment in his cloak instead.

His spear sunk into the lich’s chest, but where [Dread Lance] had blasted it to pieces last time, it was ready for the attack now. The energy sparked down the length of the shaft, then hit some sort of resistance that deflected it in every direction away from the lich.

“Not so easy now, is it, whelp?” the lich snarled at him. It thrust both hands out, and a crackling whip of purple lightning stretched out between its fingers. He swung it at Velik, its length tripling in an instant, but the monster’s physical abilities were nothing special. Velik easily dodged the attack and jerked his spear sideways to rip it out through the lich’s ribs.

The problem with undead was that injuries like that didn’t even slow them down. Flesh and bone and some sort of oozing yellow-green fluid splattered across the cathedral floor, and the lich didn’t care at all. It just gracelessly swung its whip over and over again, blindly flailing about with wide, exaggerated movements.

Immune to magic, maybe? Some sort of spell redirection, at least. Oh well, that won’t stop me from tearing it apart manually.

The liches weren’t going to just float there and take that, unfortunately. Velik had gotten the drop on them the first time they’d fought and had them on the backfoot the entire time. They’d turned the tables on him and were working beautifully together to keep him occupied. Every time he saw an opening between spells, the other lich was there, blasting away with fire and ice to stall Velik long enough for the first lich to recover.

If Velik tried to switch targets, they worked together to hinder him with curving walls of stone or ice, all designed to funnel him into that trap. Velik tried to skirt around it at first, but that just let them take more free shots at him. So he jumped it instead, causing both liches to cackle with insane glee. No doubt, they thought they’d tricked him, and when a net of fire appeared in the air in front of him, he almost crashed right through it.

[Air Walk] allowed him to go up and over, startling both liches for a second. In a fight against someone like Velik, a second was more than long enough to close the distance. He reached the fire-and-ice-spewing lich uncontested and, shaping his spear head into something like a halberd, decapitated it in a single blow. Two more quick chops removed its arms, though that did nothing to halt the staff floating nearby.

Well, I can destroy that, too.

Shattering it proved to be as simple as a single strike to the center, but that caused the mana coursing through it to explode in every direction. Objectively, that was a bad thing since Velik got caught in the detonation. But it also allowed him to get an inside view of the top layer of mana being stripped back to show him the underpinnings, and for that reason alone, it was completely worth it.

Dismembering a lich wasn’t enough to kill it, apparently. Velik wasn’t terribly surprised as most undead survived those kinds of attacks. But between that and the lost staff, he’d slowed it down considerably, and that made it that much easier to finish the job. Within a few minutes, he’d carved the fire-and-ice lich to pieces and turned his attention to its twin.

“You think you’ve won,” the lich sneered, its hood falling back to reveal a skull devoid of skin. “You can’t kill us. Liches are immortal. We’ll just keep coming back over and over again.”

“Unless I find your phylactery, yes,” Velik said. “I’m aware. I just don’t care. I’m not here to destroy you. I only wanted a place to work on some mana sensory skills.”

“You… what?”

How does it manage to look confused when its face has no muscles or skin?

“Mana sensory skills.”

“Impudence! You invade our lair for something so trivial?!”

Velik chased it down and killed it shortly after that brief interlude. If the last time was any indication, he’d have a few more hours of peace and quiet to study. With any luck, he’d be gone by the time they reformed and came after him again.

Now… how do I peel back this top layer of mana without any sort of mana control skill?