184 Mana Mesh (1/2)

The next morning after waking up, the first thing Ivan did was stretch and feeling out the state of his injuries. As he had expected they had completely healed and he was now once again in a good enough shape to fight.

So after eating a light breakfast he once again moved towards the direction where he had met that lizard yesterday. This time, not only did he pay extreme attention towards his surroundings, but he also spread out his senses in an attempt to find the beast, before it could attack him.

And his wariness paid out. This time he wasn't surprised by the appearance of the lizard since he managed to sense it in time. But he also didn't manage to sense it early enough to prepare a counterattack towards it as soon as it would appear. So in the end, not much had changed and he still got tossed around by it once again. The only difference was that he managed to lessen the impact from the lizard's hits, resulting in much lighter damage than before.

The thing that created the largest problem for him was the tail, since it was fast and strong, making it hard to evade or parry it. He currently also didn't have any viable option of blocking it. The magic shield he tried to use was easily broken by the powerful swing of the tail. If only the shield wasn't that rigid. Maybe if it was more flexible he could absorb more of the force of the swing with it?

But now wasn't the time to experiment. Instead, he fully focused on trying to evade the attacks as much as possible while migrating as much force as possible with his shields.

But once again he had to rely on Vlada to escape when he had been beaten down.

After having arrived at his camping place he then spent time recovering from his wounds as well as recuperating his mana. Then he started to experiment on his idea of a more flexible shield, which he had gotten during the fight.

\”Hm, how should I make it flexible?\”, he asked himself. He didn't have a good idea of how to start with his development of a flexible shield. He also hadn't read about something like this anywhere. The spells for shields he had seen until now all empathized the strength and sturdiness of the shields.

\”How about I copy something?\” This was the first thought that appeared in his mind. It was a common start for spells. Look at something in reality and then transfer the knowledge and design into magic.

But in reality, he also hadn't seen any flexible shields. But there was something similar in the form of armor. Both things would provide protection against attacks. But while shields were distanced from the person wearing them, armor would be located close to the body. There was hard armor such as plate armor and softer armor made with leather or cloth.

He had no idea what structure leather had and while it was possible to study it with his senses and the available leather he had, it would use up a lot of time. This only left the option of cloth. Cloth generally had a simpler and cleaner structure than leather. He also had a rough idea of how to reproduce something similar. He would use the magic strings Celine had taught them about and use it to weave a mana based cloth. He could then use multiple layers to transform the energy from the attacks to heat energy and block the attack or at least cushion it.

Having found a rough direction on how to develop his new spell he didn't hesitate to get started with it. First, he had to create the mana strings. Something that as he found out was much more difficult than expected. Forming just one that had a uniform thickness that was thin enough was already hard. But what he needed were thousands of them. And to make it work well, all of them would have to have a perfect form.

For now, he was only able to form around ten of them, each of which was shaped differently. He just wasn't able to make them shaped the same. Instead, some were thicker while others were thinner but none of them was uniform. But for now, that was what he had to work with.

With such a low number of mana strings, he was only able to make a rough mesh out of them, by weaving them together. Although this mesh had large holes in it, it should be suitable for blocking the blunt attacks by the lizard's tail. But only blunt attacks. It had completely no resistive properties against stabbing attacks.