As soon as their battle started, Merrick tried to get a handle on what to expect. He had thought of her in terms of their duel in the game at first but that proved to almost be his undoing. While he was gathering energy and expecting Rat to summon the icicle wand that she had used against him before, the one that grew into a staff and then into a tree, she drew a small metal wand from the pouch at her side.
With a flick of her wrist, a bolt of lightning arced between them. If it wasn't for the relic dagger, Spell Stealer, already being in Merrick's hand he would have been leveled by the spell. Fortunately, it looked like the wand Rat used was a one-time gambit. The metal crumbled in her fingers and she reached for another one. Before she could, Merrick released the lightning bolt that Spell Stealer had captured.
Rat was forced to duck out of the way and that led to a short stalemate in their battle. Merrick held Spell Stealer like a shield between them, ready to pick up any loose spells, and Rat's hands were at the tips of the pouches on either hip like an old western gunslinger ready to draw a revolver.
Especially standing in the gunslinger's stance, Rat hardly looked like a Wizard's Apprentice. Without the oversized hat, she looked more like a cleric than an arcane spellcaster. Her robes looked like a cross between a medic's smock and a soldier's uniform. The pouches on her hips came in various sizes. The one that she had drawn from originally looked like a kind of wand holster. From the size, Merrick assumed that two or three more wands might come from that pouch.
Her other hand was on the tip of a similar pouch. Potentially Merrick could be facing off against five or more blasts from spell-infused wands. While Spell Stealer was able to capture one with ease, Merrick had never been able to test the dagger's ability to capture and release arcane energy over and over again.
Something was off. Merrick shifted his stance slightly and tried to understand why Rat was not making a move. At first he thought that she was not willing to sacrifice more wands without a guarantee that they would work. However as the second crept forward, Merrick doubted that was the case.
Before Merrick could figure out what was going on, Rat stepped to the side and a spear of ice shot through the air where she had just been. While he was reacting to the first spear, two more started to form around Rat. She had now dropped the guise of drawing wands from her hip-holsters.
The first ice spear nearly skewered Merrick. He had moved instinctively as soon as Rat had stepped to the side and that was the only thing that kept him standing. Merrick caught the second spear with Spell Stealer, but it was physical ice and not arcane energy so it collided against his guard like a heavy tube of glass. The blow knocked him out of the way of the third spear.
Merrick stumbled to his feet and sheathed Spell Stealer. Rat had figured out a way around his equipment. However, she was not ready for the abilities that he had brought forth from the game to reality. While she was forming the fourth and fifth ice spears to throw at him, Merrick stole the move that DeathX had tried to defeat him with.
There was no point stealing the spell without improving it though. As soon as Merrick had seen the opposing Faction Leader try to create a flame wall, he had thought of a better way to do it. Watching from the outside, it looked like he stole the idea from a popular anime rather than his own in-game experience.
Merrick took on a stance like he was squeezing an invisible basketball between his palms in front of his chest. Then he summoned as much arcane energy as he could pull from the area into the empty space between his palms. At first, nothing happened, but then the air started to sizzle and a miniature sun started to form. In response, Rat stopped forming just two ice spears and instead started to form a flock of frozen daggers.
Between the two magical creations being wrought, the air around them suddenly felt devoid of arcane energy. If Merrick had been paying attention still, he could have seen the tapestries on the walls now as even that purple miasma that had been blocking his view had now been absorbed into their spellcraft.
Rat's spell was the first to be released. Merrick waited as long as he could, until the flock of frozen daggers were bearing down on him like a hail of bullets. Then he twisted his body and pushed the miniature sun forward. He held onto the arcane energy at the back of the orb but relinquished the control he had been forcing onto the rest of it.
The miniature sun lost its shape immediately but the afterimage was burned into the air as five small starburst chain reactions exploded forward. The chain reactions continued, growing exponentially as it got farther from Merrick. The explosion was weak, Merrick could barely feel the burn a few feet away from the closest explosion. However it was enough to melt all of Rat's daggers and leave singes at the ends of her robes as he brought up a shield a second too late.
As her shield faded, Rat suddenly seemed motivated to end the fight quickly. She drew something from the pouch at her hip. At first it looked like a string of wands, but then Merrick realized it was a folding staff. It snapped together and as soon as it did, Ice started to encapsulate the staff. She was going to use that Ice Tree spell that she cleared the Labyrinth with in Dungeons Below and also tried to take him out.
The movements were much faster in the real world. The Ice Tree was nearly ten feet tall by the time Rat had completed the staff and slammed it into the ground. Merrick knew that if he did nothing, the battle would end with his defeat in less than thirty seconds.
He fell back on his trusty spell, the first one he had used in-game. Rather than focusing on control like he usually did, Merrick remembered the surge from that first use. Lightning crackled on his palm, Merrick felt it sting as his skin burned.
There was a solid oak of ice between them by the time Merrick released his lightning bolt. In the split second that he could see it, Merrick would not have been able to call it a bolt. It was a torrential burst of electricity. It surged forth with everything he had. Ice cracked and shattered. The staff at its core evaporated from the pressure.
Rat summoned the same shield that protected her last time but it was not enough. The shield cracked just as easily as the ice. However, since it was arcane in origin and not a physical manifestation of an element, there was an extreme backlash as it failed.
Merrick drew Spell Stealer as soon as he realized what was happening. He was ready to absorb the rampant energy but it suddenly disappeared. Rat was just as surprised, neither knew what to do for a second, but then Rat charged forth.
As she was drawing a cursed dagger from one of her pouches, Merrick heard a soft voice in the air, "That's enough, Apprentice."
It was his boss's voice. Rat let out a guttural growl of disagreement and continued charging. While the words hung in the air, Merrick saw a cloud of that purple miasma form around her feet. Before she cleared the distance between them, the cloud grew into a fine mist surrounding her and then it vanished, taking her with it.
Merrick kept Spell Stealer ready and waited but no more danger came. A spiral staircase appeared out of thin air on the far end of the wall from where he had entered. It was clearly welcoming him upward. Merrick nearly took it immediately but he paused when he remembered something from earlier… There had been two entrances to the clock tower from the Hilltop Gallery. He had seen two stone constructs, each protecting a different door.
Yet the room that he had entered into only had one door and now a spiral stair heading upward. The dimensions were right for what should have been there, but where was the other door? The simplest explanation would have seemed insane to Merrick just a few months earlier. When he passed into the clock tower, he left the Hilltop Gallery and ended up in a different tower that inhabited the same physical space.
He had seen it time and time again inside of video games. If he closed his eyes, he could feel the energy in the air. It felt sort of like the strange swirling dimension that he had been banished to but it was definitely a different energy than had been hanging around the old building he had just been inside.
With that knowledge, Merrick remembered what the Wizard's Apprentice had told him when he defeated her avatar in-game. He even said the words to himself as he headed for the spiral stairs, "He is one of the more powerful people in the City."