Chapter 114: Spell: Invalid It wasn’t conscious. His body was simply responding to the way Osmund moved, the way the air seemed to thicken with growing tension at each of his step. Like the beat of a war drum getting steadily louder. By the time Finn realized what was happening, he’d already partially embodied the Ferropteryx’s innate magic. He could feel the wind currents around the clearing, sense the trace metals in the platform beneath his feet and the tower behind Osmund. His fragment spells hovered at the edges of his mind, ready to actualize at a moment’s notice. His eyes locked onto Osmund with intense focus that no longer required conscious thought. So when Osmund took the last step and landed on the platform, pausing for just a moment... Finn wasn’t caught off guard by what happened next. Like an apparition, Osmund’s figure disappeared. And without hesitation, Finn reacted. With a thought, he was four steps to the left. Then eight steps back. Then twelve steps to the right. Frame-skipping across the platform in rapid succession, his body glitching through space as he fired off wind gusts with swings of his arm. Osmund appeared where Finn had been standing half a second ago, with his hand outstretched in a grasping motion that closed on empty air. For a split second, their eyes met across the distance. Shock flashed briefly in Osmund’s expression at the spell Finn had just used to escape. But as quickly as it came, the look disappeared. The air about him immediately changed. He became more serious. Like he’d just recalibrated his entire assessment of Finn’s capabilities. He vanished again, and the wind gusts Finn had fired sailed harmlessly past where he had been. Shit! Finn frame-skipped again, this time deliberately making his movements random and without pattern or predictability. The familiar disorientation tugged at his equilibrium, but his practice from last night had built up some tolerance. He could handle it for a while longer before it truly affected him. He gritted his teeth as his eyes flitted about constantly for any sign of Osmund reappearing. Making sure to never stay in one spot for more than a second before glitching to another position. Then— There! A subtle distortion in the air maybe fifteen feet away. Finn focused more consciously this time, visualizing the wind spell as thin strips of compressed air shaped into cutting edges. [Wind Blade!] He’d noticed something important during those first few exchanges. Despite embodying the Ferropteryx’s magic and having its inherent affinity for wind and metal, his instinctive usage wasn’t as versatile or powerful as what the original Ferropteryx soul mass could do. Human Arcanists while alive never cast spells without words unless they’d practiced them extensively — hundreds or thousands of times. The incantation served as a trigger, a shortcut that bypassed the need for full conscious visualization every single time. For his Error spells, Finn was deliberately avoiding names. He wanted to reach a very high proficiency first, make them truly second nature before locking in specific incantations. But for the Ferropteryx wind magic? He barely had any practice or experience with it. His previous general wind gust had required too much visualization for too little power. So he streamlined it with verbal triggers, letting the incantation carry part of the mental load. The [Wind Blades] shot forward — five compressed crescents of air that sailed with whizzing sounds towards Osmund. Finn frame-skipped immediately, not waiting to see the result. He appeared in a new position and paused for a moment longer than before. Partly to give himself mental reprieve, as he was starting to feel the strain, and partly because Osmund hadn’t bothered dodging. The short man stood where the blades had struck, with one arm raised. Finn’s eyes caught the diagonal slits across his forearm immediately the wind blades landed. They only formed tiny cuts that barely even bled. Osmund glanced at it with a small smile, almost approving. But his attention shifted away almost immediately. The wound was too minor to care about. His eyes found Finn in his new position with obvious interest. "How curious," Osmund said, speaking like he was analyzing out loud. "Earlier, I was waiting for spatial distortions when you moved. But there weren’t any." He tilted his head, studying Finn like a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve. "You’re not disturbing the fabric of space at all. You’re not teleporting or phasing... So what are you doing?" Finn said nothing, only clenching his jaw and raising his guard up and his fragment ready. Osmund frowned, but it was from a place of eagerness rather than frustration. Like he’d just been presented with an interesting problem. "I’m going to take this seriously now," he warned Finn with excitement in his voice. "Ready yourself." The air pressure changed. Finn felt it before he even saw anything — the way reality seemed to compress around Osmund. Space itself bent inward toward the short man like he’d become a localized gravity well. Oh shit. Finn frame-skipped on pure instinct. And immediately he reappeared, Osmund was right in front of him. Almost like he had predicted Finn’s destination before he even completed the jump. A hand clamped around Finn’s wrist mid-glitch, and suddenly he was yanked back into full physical coherence. His next frame-skip interrupted, aborted halfway through. Finn’s eyes went wide. How—? But there was no time to process. Osmund’s other hand was already moving, reaching for Finn’s chest in what looked like a simple palm strike but carried that same spatial compression effect. [Invalid] Finn chanted the spell on pure instinct, using an incantation for the first time, targeting not the attack itself but the connection between Osmund’s hand and his body. Making reality register that the ’status’ of the strike was wrong, that contact hadn’t occured... Osmund’s palm hit air instead of flesh, passing through the space Finn’s chest occupied like it wasn’t there. Both of them froze for a microsecond, equally shocked — Finn at the fact that the spell had still worked in that manner, and Osmund at the absurdity of it entirely. Osmund’s experience kicked in and he recovered first. His grip on Finn’s wrist tightened and he yanked Finn forward while simultaneously stepping back, using momentum to throw Finn off balance. Finn let himself fall into it, dropped into a roll, and came up six feet away already activating his frame skip again. [Space Edict: Anchor] Finn immediately felt the surroundings become heavy. His frame-skip activated but he moved maybe two feet instead of four, suppressed by whatever Osmund had just done. And Osmund was right there, with his hand already moving in that grasping motion again. "[Wind Blade]!" Finn shouted desperately at point-blank range. The compressed air slash formed between them— And shattered. It simply fell apart, dispersing harmlessly as space itself rejected the spell’s structure. "[Space Edict: Dissolve]," Osmund calmly finished the words he used to disperse Finn’s wind spell. Then his hand closed around Finn’s shoulder and the world lurched. Suddenly Finn was on his back on the platform, with Osmund’s hand still on his shoulder, pinning him in place. The short man crouched over him, not even breathing hard. "Interesting," Osmund said, studying Finn’s face with his pale gray eyes. "Very interesting. You created not one but two spells in a single day. And that second one..." His tone became solemn as he released Finn and stood, offering a hand to help him up. Finn took it, still processing what had just happened. The entire exchange had lasted maybe fifteen seconds, and he’d been completely outmatched the moment Osmund decided to actually try.