Rangers magic 2, p.1
Ranger's Magic 2, page 1
Ranger’s Magic 2
DB King
Copyright © 2022 by DB King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v002
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Contents
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Free progression Fantasy Novel!
Contents
Series by DB King
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
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Support DB King on Patreon!
Free progression Fantasy Novel!
About the Author
Series by DB King
Apocalypse Knights
Crafter’s Fate
Dragon Magus
Dungeon of Evolution
Elemental Mastery
Fatehaven Farm
Kensei
Mage’s Path
Night Guild
Ranger’s Magic
Shinobi Rising
Spellweaver Codex: Elder Mage Chronicles
Summoner’s Shadow
The Last Magus
War Wizard
Chapter 1
Rain fell hard, mixing with sweat on Ralnor's brow to soak his hair and run stinging down into his eyes. The breath roared in and out of his lungs, and the blood thundered in his ears. In his hands, the two magical vector swords that had been made for him by his friend, Farlo, gleamed with pale green light in the dimness of the clearing.
“Come on, Ralnor,” the old hermit, Akhen, growled, “You can do better than that. I know you can. You know you can!”
Ralnor wrenched himself away from the desire to make a sarcastic reply to the old half-elf. Akhen was his trainer, his mentor, and his friend.
He only wants the best for you. That’s why he’s pushing you, Ralnor told himself for the hundredth time that afternoon. Do your best for him, for yourself.
He tried.
In front of him, the beautiful face of his friend and squad member, Lana the night elf, glared at him through the rain. She was armed with a small round shield and a long straight sword, and as he sized her up and prepared himself to make another attack, her battle snarl turned into a wicked grin.
“How about I help you?” she said with mischief in her voice, and before Akhen could stop her, she whirled toward Ralnor with her sword raised in her right hand and her shield ready to block in her left.
Ralnor felt as if he was moving through treacle as he surged to counter her attack. Nevertheless, his body moved faster than his mind, and his twin blades cut rapidly through the air, countering her left-handed strike and knocking her blade down, while delivering a series of swift blows to the surface of her shield.
“That’s more like it!” Lana yelled encouragingly. “Come on!” she goaded as she opened her defenses up for a moment, tempting him to come in for a strike.
Ralnor darted in, raising the gleaming tip of his sharp sword up toward her belly and then thrusting forward. The blade tapped on the linked plates of her dark green dyed Ranger armor, and as soon as the tip of the gleaming blade struck her, a crackling blue light expanded out across the surface of her armor, and he felt his blade thrust back as if by an invisible hand.
“Good, Lana!” Akhen called from his position on Ralnor’s right hand side. “Great magical shield work! I did not know you had that in place.”
“So, I have learned not only to shield, but to conceal the presence of the magical shield from an observer!” Lana said proudly.
“Did you see the magical shield there, Ralnor?” Akhen asked.
Ralnor took two steps back and lowered his blades. “I did,” he said. “If I had not, I would not have struck out so freely.”
Akhen gave him a considering look. “That’s good,” he said. “Your sense of the magic in the environment around you must be coming back.”
“I can barely feel its presence at all!” Ralnor said, and the frustration that had been building in him over the past week suddenly flared up. “I can’t even reliably sense the presence of magic, never mind engage with it in the same way as before. I saw Lana’s magical shield just now, yes, despite her attempt to mask its presence. But a month ago, I would have been able to reach through the connection between Lana and her shield and turn the very shield itself against her! A month ago, I would have been able to steal her shield, or use it to stop her from being able to move, or even reach past it and use her own spell to manufacture a mind link through which I could steal her memories and read her mind without her even knowing it!”
He stopped, suddenly aware that his voice had risen to a shout. He lowered his blades, withdrawing the magical energy that he had been channeling through them. The green light that had glowed around the sharp curved edges retreated and went dim.
“And now,” he said more quietly, holding up the beautiful curved blades to look at them, “I can barely summon enough magical power to make these swords glow, and my awareness of her power is about as strong as a mole’s awareness of the sunlight.”
“It will take time,” Akhen said kindly. “I have told you before that the most important thing for you to do is not to become obsessed with the difference in your power now from how it used to be. You must concentrate on your Ranger work, your swordplay, your tracking, your archery, foraging, navigating, and hunting, and with time your ability to project magical power will return to you. If I’ve said it once…”
“… you’ve said a hundred times,” Ralnor and Lana both finished for him.
Akhen looked between them in surprise, and then a slow smile spread across his face. “And I suppose I have said that a hundred times as well, eh?” he chuckled. “Don’t be discouraged,” he continued, slapping Ralnor on the back. “It will come. Any other sorcerer who had channeled as much power as you did during that battle would have been vaporized. Trust me, all that you have suffered is a minor setback in comparison to what might’ve happened.”
“And let’s look on the bright side,” Lana added with a wry look at the sky. “We get to be out here and enjoying this wonderful weather!”
Ralnor had to laugh. The rain was coming down in a torrent, and it had not let up for days. Akhen was carrying his trusty companion: an enormous umbrella made of light wood and thin tanned hide. The water pattered on the surface of the leather and ran off in thin rivulets onto the ground around him. The umbrella, plus his fur lined leather cloak, kept Akhen relatively warm and dry during these training sessions. No such luxury was accorded to Ralnor and Lana, of course, and they were soaked, their hair plastered to their heads and their outer garments running with rainwater, and their inner garments soaked with sweat from their training, which cooled quickly when they stopped exerting themselves.
They had been training like this for ten days. At first, they had focused on practicing magical abilities, but when it had become clear that Ralnor was not going to be able to get back to his former level of power quickly, they had moved on to focus on practicing the non-magical Ranger abilities in the hope that, given time, Ralnor’s magical expertise would come back of its own accord.
Lana liked that just fine, as the Ranger abilities were her area of expertise, and she relished the opportunity to show off that she was a more skilled fighter with blade and shield than Ralnor.
For Ralnor however, this sudden hampering of his magic represented an area of deep and abiding frustration for him; as the days had passed, it had become harder an
Only a few months ago he, Ralnor Twicebain, raised as an orphan in the slums of the lowest level of Suntower city, had found his life changed literally overnight through the discovery of his immensely powerful magical heritage. As a half-human, half-elf hybrid, he was already at risk of being severely disliked by his fellow citizens, the native full-blooded high elves and wood elves of Suntower city. Magic was universally hated and feared by the high elves and the wood elves. Now that he had manifested a powerful magical talent, he would have been killed by those he lived amongst if he had not been summoned up from the slums by the King of the Elves himself. King Harald III, an ancient and venerable old high elf, had explained the legacy that had been passed down to Ralnor from his father.
Ralnor the orphan was none other than the son of Parlax, the most powerful human magician of the previous age and Rella, his elven wife. The power of Parlax had been inherited by Ralnor and, combined with the mixing of human and elven bloodlines, Ralnor had manifested in a level of power that was all but unheard of since the age of majors, before the great Sundering had torn the world apart, divided its peoples, and changed the path of fate forever.
But Ralnor was only twenty years old, and that was a very young age for a race of beings who generally lived to be two hundred and fifty years old at the very least. The great Sundering had happened centuries ago, so for a young elf like him, it was more of a legend than anything else.
How could it be that his father had been alive then, back in those misty days of legendary greatness when human and elf worked together and magic was used for the benefit of all?
King Harald answered his questions, and the answers were more fantastic than anything Ralnor could’ve imagined on his own.
More than three hundred years earlier, when Ralnor was just a baby of three months in age, Parlax had been destroyed in the great magical calamity known as the Sundering.
Parlax’s wild ambition for the ultimate magic of resurrecting the dead had combined with his own madness of grief following the death of the high elf Rella, his wife, Ralnor’s mother. Parlax had gathered more power than the world had ever seen into a single place, forcing it all into one great orb of crystal in the hope of using it to power a resurrection spell that would bring his wife back to life.
But both his hope and his ambition had come to nothing. The spell had gone catastrophically wrong, and the chaotic explosion of raw magical power that followed had brought about the great Sundering, and Parlax’s own destruction.
King Harald III, one of the oldest living elves known, was one of the few people still alive who actually remembered the great Sundering. He had been king then, too, and had led the high elves through all the terrible years in between then and now. Through an alliance with the wood elves, King Harald had brought about the years that were known among the elves as the great restoration, and had founded Suntower city deep in the ancient Greenwood Forest, far from the Forbidden City and far from the heart of the old empire of Galen.
When they had spoken together on that fateful night, the king told Ralnor that which few people knew; Harald himself had been there with Parlax at the moment of the great magician’s destruction. At the last, Parlax had realized the depth of his own folly, that his magic would cause the world to end, and so he had sacrificed himself, absorbing a great portion of the gathered power into his own body rather than letting it out into the world.
Through this sacrifice, Parlax had saved the world. Though the great Sundering still happened, even that was preferable to the alternative. Without Parlax’s sacrifice, the world and all its inhabitants would have been wiped out of existence.
In his final moments, Parlax had begged Harald to keep the infant Ralnor safe, and so, with his own hand, Harald had placed the infant Ralnor in a magical preservation chamber deep under the roots of the great tree city of Highbough, capital of the old elven empire of Galen.
Through the long centuries during which the elves had rebuilt their society after the disaster of the great Sundering, Ralnor had slept in magical stasis in the preservation chamber, until, one day around twenty years ago, King Harald had decided that it was time for the young heir to Parlax’s great power to awaken from his sleep.
With a small escort of elite soldiers, King Harald himself had returned to the site of the now-derelict city of Highbough. Few people visited there now. It was known in Elvish legend as a place of dread and terror, and they called it the Forbidden City.
But deep beneath the earth, far below the roots of the enormous tree that had been the city of Highbough, the preservation chambers remained untouched. Wards and spells of binding and protection more ancient and powerful than anything above the ground were woven around the preservation chambers, and only a very few people still knew the magical passwords needed to access them.
Harald was one of those, and so he and a small group of elite soldiers braved the terrors of the Forbidden City to retrieve the infant Ralnor and bring him back to Suntower city and relative safety.
Harald knew that Parlax and Rella had desired as close to a normal life as possible for their young son. So, when he had returned to Suntower city, Harald had placed Ralnor with a humble family of the lower districts of the city, and had allowed him to be raised in ignorance of the legendary magical powers and the great and terrible deeds that had given rise to his existence.
And Ralnor’s life had been normal, until that night when he had manifested his power, and the King had called him to the throne room.
Since the elves feared and hated magic, and Ralnor’s display of his powers had been rather public, Harald had judged it best for Ralnor to travel to the borderlands and learn to master his talents there. Ralnor had traveled to Rayne’s Outpost, where the Rangers kept up the border skirmishes with the humans who had their territory to the far west of the Red River.
Here, under the tutelage of Akhen, he had swiftly mastered immense power, using it to defeat the human mage Malavax and foil his plans to destroy Ralnor and the garrison at Rayne’s Outpost. That battle had been decided, however, when Ralnor had been forced to absorb the life force of Malavax.
That had proved too much for Ralnor. It had given him an immense boost of power, and the battle was won, but Ralnor’s magic had not returned to full strength afterward.
“Hey,” Lana said playfully. “What are you thinking so hard about?”
Ralnor gave himself a shake. Only a moment had passed, but he felt suddenly calmer.
“Oh, I was just running over all that’s happened in my head,” he said, then turned to Akhen. “I’m sorry I raised my voice a moment ago, Akhen,” he said. “I didn’t mean to shout. It’s frustrating, that’s all. I had gotten so used to magic coming so easily. I guess building my powers back up to that level will just take a bit of time. ”
“Hey, don’t worry too much, lad,” he said kindly. “We understand, don’t we Lana?”
Lana rolled her eyes, but her grin took the sting out of the gesture. “I understand,” she confirmed. “But we have to live with the impact of the battle. As Akhen says, the need to rest is to be expected. It’s like fighting a battle with a sword, or running a great distance all at once. The more energy is expended in the one effort, the less likely you’re going to be able to make a similar effort straight afterward. Look at our army at the outpost; they were in no condition to be doing any hard fighting the day after the battle. I didn’t want to lift a sword for a few days, that’s for sure.”
“That’s true,” Akhen said. “And that’s a good way to view the situation. Ralnor, think of your magic powers as an army that has pushed itself to great efforts. You need time to regroup.”
Ralnor allowed himself a smile. “You’re right, of course,” he said. “And after all, it’s given us the chance to see Lana develop some magic powers of her own, against all expectations.”
“All your expectations, you mean,” Akhen said. “I expected it from the first.”
“And my expectations too,” Lana said. “I’m a night elf, and as such I always knew I had more potential for magic than, say, a wood elf or a high elf, but I never thought I would see the day when I found that potential in myself. In my homeland, when I was growing up, some of my fellow night elves had magic and used it, but it was still rare.”
