16 Cursed Fire

The mutant ape's abode was constructed to fit its size. Chronus was dwarfed by the structure piled up from stones to several times his height. He entered through the yawning doorway and into the damp and dingy interior. A layer of festering slime had been slathered on the walls as some sort of cement, exuding such an abominable stench that even flies didn't dare approach it. Even though Chronus held his breath, the foul air managed to worm its way into his nose, making him want to vomit.

He gingerly stepped into the cavern, his feet squelching on the mucous cobblestone as he made his way into the recesses of the cave. He passed by the bed amassed from rotting plant matter that was by the entrance and looked around for where the beast could have kept any valuable items.

There were not many places to hide anything in the den and Chronus soon found what he was looking for. Clustered together in a corner were various materials that the ape had hoarded over its reign in the forest. The ape had rudimentary intelligence, and magic materials were quite easy to identify. Even if it didn't know what they did, the mutant ape evidently saw their unusualness and kept them by its side, which was expected from this kind of beast.

Chronus rummaged through the ape's stash. There were all sorts of irregular items in the collection, and there were only a few that were usable by him. The materials had not been properly maintained and had deteriorated over time. The poor condition they were in lowered their value, but having something was better than nothing at all.

To Chronus' joy, there was a despondent looking ironbark tree in the ape's hoard. The pathetic looking branches that drooped limply by its side spoke to its poor state, but with some cultivation it could be restored to a usable state. He discarded some completely worthless scraps and carried the ones that still held value back to his retreat in the forest.

Some of the ape's vile slime was also scooped up and brought back to be smeared around the border of his hideaway in order to discourage other beasts from disturbing him. The ironbark tree was carefully transplanted to a location right by the mana rich pond to accelerate its recovery.

Back in his tower, Chronus sat down and deeply pondered over the shortcomings he showed over the course of his fight with the mutant ape. He was still unfamiliar with his new system of power. Most glaring was the lack of sheer force that could break through the beast's tenacious defenses and vitality. While he managed to eventually emerge victorious through a string of carefully crafted tricks, similar methods would never work against a human warrior of similar caliber.

He currently possessed a large arsenal of ways to respond to and restrain any opponent he faced. This was the reason why he chose witchcraft to be the basis of his tower. Whether it was immobilizing the enemy, misleading, weakening, manipulating, or concealing himself from them, Chronus had the ability to excel in all these areas.

But in his previous life, Chronus had been a traditional mage tower master. Facing hefty meatballs was his ideal choice of opponent. All they offered was a large target that he could drown in and blast a hole straight through with a violent torrent of magic. This pursuit of firepower was what almost every mage that held elemental magic as their core prescribed to. While the obnoxious style and incapacity of subtlety were what drove him away from repeating the same path, Chronus had to admit in some ways it had strengths that were hard to beat.

He knew that if he didn't find a way to solve this issue it could continue to plague him through his growth as a tower master. The inability to swiftly dispatch a resilient opponent was not a fatal weakness. After all, they somewhat formed a mutual restraint, where they both couldn't easily deal with the other and their fight would transition into a battle of attrition, comparing who could be exhausted before the other. Chronus didn't believe a defensive enemy could defeat him in such a battle, with all his means of recovery and draining them.

Even if it wasn't a fatal weakness, it was a weakness nonetheless that would be dangerous if left unchecked. After thinking about it for a while, the easiest solution was to leverage the advantage brought by alchemy and manufacture an army of elemental puppets and artillery, mimicking the fighting style of his previous life. This was a viable solution, but it was one that was expensive and couldn't be put in place in his current situation.

The other solution he found was to attack the soul. Many individuals who focused on building their physical strength and resilience didn't have the resources or the time to invest in also training the soul. This solution also had downsides. It was never a good idea to think the adversary is an idiot. If one knew their soul was weak, they could carry defensive equipment that protected it. The aspect of the soul was also difficult to manifest in a purely offensive manner. It often required a large disparity in strength for one to attack and shatter another's soul. Chronus wasn't interested in developing methods of abusing weaklings.

Suddenly, Chronus realized he had fallen into an inertial line of thought. Why did he have to punch through the opponent with brute force? Since his current methods could readily trump such an enemy in terms of a battle of attrition, why not strengthen this area even further? If he was going to disgust the enemy, might as well disgust him to death.

Chronus took a curse as his target of study. The one he chose was the curse of exhaustion. This spell had the function of rapidly exhausting the target's stamina. It was similar to the curse of weakness, but much more specialized. Chronus also possessed a spell model of an improved version of the curse, where after emptying the target's physical stamina, it would move on to consuming their life force, draining them of life.

This spell was one that he had previously ignored. A major reason was that it functioned in an inconvenient way. The caster would spend their mana on the curse, and a certain amount of stamina would be exhausted from the target. This boiled down to a comparison of energy reserves, which was not an effective method of combat.

Chronus took inspiration from the form of magic he was most familiar with, fire magic. He wanted to take the nature of fire, where energy needed to be consumed as fuel, and combine it with the curse of exhaustion.

From Chronus' analysis, the curse of exhaustion was a spell that excelled in what it did. It was very efficient at emptying the target's stamina. However, in prioritizing the speed of exhaustion, the curse functioned by dissipating the energy drained into nothingness. It was like scooping out buckets of water as fast as possible without a care as to where the water was dumped to.

The other target of modification was the most basic fire spell, ignite. The spell was incredibly simple, it had an input of magic energy, which was the fuel for the fire, and the other part expressed the nature of the spell, which consumed the energy into flame.

What Chronus attempted to do was to modify the second section of the spell by combining it with the curse of exhaustion. This modification was something he had done countless times, but the aspect of the witchcraft spell was something he was not too familiar with.

It took many experiments before he managed to reconstruct the curse of weakness into a usable form for his purpose. The spell had turned into a monstrosity that was terribly optimized, but it could somewhat perform its desired purpose.

"I would never have been able to obtain these results without the support from my tower," he lamented, "A normal mage would have had to intermittently rest for extensive periods of time before being able to perform the same experiments."

His new product was still heavily based on fire magic, which he was most proficient at, but with the burning of the flames of the new spell, the stamina of the target would be consumed to fuel the flames, further spreading the cursed flames.

"Cursed fire!"

A flame tinged in purple lit up in hand. He moved his other arm over the cursed flame and it swiftly ignited. Different from a normal fire, he didn't feel a searing heat. Rather, Chronus felt his arm becoming heavier and he started to have difficulty keeping it in the air. As the flames spread, the effects became much more pronounced. He started panting as he became more and more exhausted. Trying to swat out the purplish flames did nothing as they clung to him like a maggot.

"There is a lot of room for improvement," Chronus muttered as he viewed the new spell, "The most important is to make it more compatible with the rules of my tower core. There is too much influence from fire magic expressed in it. The effectiveness will be greatly improved if I fix this."

While he said this, he extinguished the flame and didn't plan to continue to modify the spell. It already served its current purpose of providing him immediate combat power against monsters and other individuals that had high physical power and endurance.

Chronus could imagine how much easier the fight with the mutant ape would have been if he had this spell. By casting the cursed flames on the ape and using the same shadow anchor, it would have been exhausted to death smoothly without the need for him to risk injuries by attacking with his axe. His progressing strength and the gains of the day made him quite satisfied.