The Rune Mage Starting at Hogwarts

Chapter 232: Ryze, the Wandering Mage

Ryze actually knows that he is still far from being as good as the young homeless Ryze.

After all, Runeterra is a place renowned for its outstanding people and resources, and while Ryze's early storyline wasn't as powerful as the later storyline of the Rune Mage Ryze, he was still considered one of the strongest mages in Runeterra.

However, the challenge mode itself has different levels of difficulty.

It is divided into three difficulty levels: easy, normal, and hard.

Since there's no real cost to failure, I actually tried the other two difficulties of Ryze to see how strong the wandering Ryze was.

Under the difficult difficulty, Ryze immediately unleashed his ultimate, filling the entire arena with lightning and rune power. Ryze was instantly killed before he could even activate his protective spell.

The normal difficulty is a bit better, at least it doesn't start with an ultimate ability, but to be honest, Ryze thinks this should be the strength of the Wanderer Ryze in normal mode.

Even without using their ultimate abilities, the Thunder King and the Spell Gun are no joke. They can unleash three skills in a second without any problem. Ryze can put up a fight, but he is no match for them. He can probably only last a few rounds at the very beginning of the game thanks to the super-fast reaction speed brought by the Mad Scientist.

However, as the opponent continued to deal damage, Ryze couldn't hold on after managing to withstand the first wave.

The easy mode reduces Ryze's output frequency and also lowers the opponent's combat intelligence. The moves used become more like those of the characters in the game, basically just a few skills of the old Ryze being used in a loop.

Most importantly, the easy mode also shows Ryze a "health bar". As long as Ryze can empty the opponent's health bar, he can win the battle.

However, even with the reduced output frequency, Ryze in easy mode can still unleash two skills per second without stopping. Furthermore, after the battle lasts for more than two and a half minutes, the opponent will start using their ultimate, which doubles the damage and turns all skills into area-of-effect damage.

This is also why Ryze has never been able to hold out against a wandering Ryze for more than three minutes.

The damage from the opponent's ultimate is too high, and it deals two large-area AOE attacks per second. Ryze really doesn't have many ways to deal with it right now.

So far, Ryze's best result is only taking down about 70% of the Rogue Ryze's health bar, and he is still a long way from defeating the opponent.

However, to be fair, the casting speed of the easy mode Ryze is acceptable for Ryze, and the energy fluctuations on the opponent's body are also clearer when they use those spells.

So after being brutally beaten by Simple Ryze a few times, Ryze started trying to steal the magic he used while enduring the beatings.

Although the effect was mediocre, the magic in this world is all about idealism; the power of belief is the strongest magic.

Rizzi simply went to Professor Flitwick to learn some basic principles of lightning magic, and then tried to imitate them little by little.

In this regard, Rezs has made rapid progress.

After all, light itself is a type of electromagnetic wave, and the effect of illuminating runes can also be applied to lightning magic.

Now, with the help of runes and a wand, Ryze can barely unleash lightning magic that looks similar to the Wandering Ryze, but so far only the appearance is similar, and there are still many differences in essence.

But Ryze wasn't discouraged. He decided to get the basic shape right first, and then add new things little by little.

He wasn't in a hurry at all.

After all, since returning from the dueling tournament, he is now almost at the level of a regular adult wizard. His biggest weakness right now is actually his mana.

Although Ryze has grown over the past year, his mana has increased from just over 300 when he first entered the school to over 450, thanks to the natural growth of his body and mind. However, if the intensity of the duel is too high or the duration exceeds five minutes, Ryze will have to sacrifice his life to cast spells.

"I still don't have enough mana. I wonder when I'll be able to get a Tear to increase my mana," Ryze muttered to himself, while looking at the wandering Ryze standing in front of him.

"So the strategy against Ryze is to try to lower his health in the first two and a half minutes, and then hold on for a while to deal massive damage after he gets going. With my current strength, I still have a chance to beat him."

Of course, it really was only a tiny, very small chance.

In any case, Ryze's main intention in fighting the wandering Ryze was to learn and gain practical experience, and he did not expect to get the reward by passing the easy difficulty.

"Then let's begin today's battle," Ryze adjusted his state and then directly selected to start.

Faced with the easy-to-use Ryze, Ryze still used his best skill, the Light Slash, to start the fight. After all, the easy Ryze doesn't have much of a brain and relies on his vision to fight.

Basically, light magic can give Ryze about one minute of safe output time.

Of course, this move is only effective against easy Ryze; it's completely useless against regular Ryze.

After all, light magic is simply the distortion of light and vision.

However, a rogue Ryze with a brain can directly sense the magical energy fluctuations and attack the location where the magical energy fluctuations appear, which at most produces some effect at the very beginning of the game.

With the casting of Intense Light and Light Magic, the aimless wanderer Ryze began to launch a defensive offensive by continuously casting lightning magic around him.

After this period of learning, Ryze has gradually adapted to the opponent's fighting rhythm. He uses the speed boost from his shoes to dodge the opponent's spell attacks, while Aery also enters a fighting stance.

The Soul Arena doesn't restrict the use of items and familiars, so he was finally able to hone his and Ellie's combat synergy in actual combat.

Under the cover of light magic, Ryze dodged the attacks of the wandering Ryze while simultaneously casting offensive spells at him.

Aery was constantly weaving through the barrage of spells, continuously generating protective spells for Ryze, while also interfering with the wandering Ryze's attacks.

Ryze did not use Ultimate Flash directly.

This move is very taxing on Ryze.

Even though the spell is now basically perfected and the cost has been reduced a lot, it still consumes 100-200 mana points per use.

Furthermore, a single Ultimate Flash costing 200 mana can only reduce Ryze's health by about 20%. Unless Ryze can unleash four consecutive Ultimate Flashes at their highest power, there is no way to defeat Ryze with Ultimate Flash alone.

Chapter 233: Challenge Failed

In fact, Ryze can force himself to use three Ultimate Flashes by consuming health.

The problem is that after three shots, he ran out of mana and his health was down to half. He was basically powerless against the enemy. He couldn't rely entirely on Aery to finish off the rest of his health.

So at most, they'll unleash two ultimate flashes at the very last moment as a finishing touch.

But before that, he first had to figure out a way to work with Aery to reduce Ryze's health to around 40%.

Of course, if Ryze had mastered dark magic, the battle against Simple Ryze would probably be much easier.

After all, the damage and destructive power of dark magic are indeed stronger than that of white magic.

If Ryze had mastered Avada Kedavra right now, he might be able to experience the feeling of instantly killing his opponent.

But nowadays, Ryze doesn't really have many ways to learn advanced dark magic.

On the one hand, he was still too young. Even Sirius Black and Rupin only taught him some basic dark magic. Sirius Black would not open the Dark Magic books in the Black family to Ryze for at least two more years.

On the other hand, it is also a constraint that Ryze imposes on himself.

After all, dark magic relies on negative emotions to be cast, and the stronger the negative emotions, the greater the power of dark magic.

The main reason those dark wizards lost control was that they were in a state of negative emotions for a long time. As a result, they might completely lose control of their negative emotions and fall into darkness after just one accidental conflict.

Although Ryze's current Doomsday Prophet talent can help him absorb curses in dark magic that are harmful to the human body, negative emotions are not curses and cannot be neutralized.

Ryze felt that if he could acquire another Prismatic talent of the Cursed type, "Fearbringer," he might be able to ignore these negative emotions and cast dark magic.

However, Ryze hasn't seen another person with a talent for cursing since, so he remains very cautious about dark magic.

"Torn apart!"

Arcane Comet!

Ryze kept casting spells that were more cost-effective and could inflict more damage on enemies with the same amount of mana.

Among these, the Arcane Comet, which he rarely used, finally had its stage to shine.

To be honest, Rizzo never used Arcane Comet, a talent he possessed, in the tournament. Even within Hogwarts, only a few professors and his roommates knew that he knew this "innately awakened ancient magic."

The reason Ryze doesn't use this move often isn't because it's weak.

In reality, this move is quite destructive. With the same mana cost, it's basically one of Ryze's most powerful spells.

Ryze rarely uses this spell, mainly because it's relatively slow to cast.

It takes about one second to condense the Arcane Comet, and once it is launched, the direction of the attack is fixed and cannot be adjusted.

Moreover, wizards are generally able to prepare defenses against obvious magic like Arcane Comets before they are launched.

Unless you can easily create a meteorite several meters in size, it's very difficult to hit those agile wizards.

To condense such a large "comet" in a short period of time would require at least a thousand mana points, which is simply beyond Ryze's current capabilities.

Ultimate Flash actually requires a certain amount of time to charge up, but the Ultimate Flash Charm is difficult to defend against, so even if it takes a long time to charge up, it can still play a role at crucial moments.

Arcane Comet, a spell that is slow to cast, relatively obvious, and easy to dodge, is basically useless until Ryze's mana reaches 1000.

However, Arcane Comet is very effective against simple-minded "bots" like Ryze.

Arcane Comet, costing 5 mana, can deal 1% damage to a Wandering Ryze who has no defense or dodge, making it more efficient than Ultimate Flash, only slower in dealing damage.

Theoretically, just one hundred Arcane Comets would be enough to kill Ryze.

In just two and a half minutes, even though Ryze kept using other spells and interspersing Arcane Comet attacks, he could only unleash about twenty Arcane Comets before Wandering Ryze entered Phase Two.

Finally, when Ryze entered the second phase, Ryze successfully reduced Ryze's health by 45% thanks to the attacks of Arcane Comet and Aery.

To be honest, this was already Ryze's best performance.

But the remaining 15% of health is really hard to defeat.

Because after entering the second stage, Ryze activates his ultimate ability.

All magical damage was doubled, and the area of ​​effect of the spells was increased, leaving Ryze with virtually no room to maneuver. Most of the time, he could only rely on Aery and his own double protective spells to withstand the damage.

However, this also caused Ryze's mana to be consumed exceptionally quickly.

In just half a minute, Ryze had already consumed a third of his mana just to defend against the attacks of the wandering Ryze.

In the end, Ryze managed to land a Final Flash before running out of mana, which reduced the wandering Ryze's health to 75%.

Ryze calculated the remaining health he had and how much he could lose through his life-saving spell. He knew that although he theoretically still had a chance, the probability was extremely small.

Because even when his mana is low, although he can still continue to cast spells by consuming health points, he cannot get rid of the dizziness and lightheadedness that comes with depleted mana.

Almost every time he cast a spell, he felt a sharp pain in his head, and the intensity of the spell would decrease significantly.

However, he did not give up immediately.

After all, he also had to adapt to fighting with low health and low mana, which would be fatal outside, but at least he had room to try and fail in the Soul Arena.

Finally, with his mana depleted, Ryze desperately unleashed another Ultimate Flash, but this time the Ultimate Flash spell only had half its original power.

With only 9% health remaining, Ryze, despite triggering his two-second invulnerability passive that you can't touch, was still completely defeated by the opponent's Surge of Magic.

As the words "challenge failed" appeared in his mind, Ryze felt his body quickly recover.

This is an inherent effect of the Soul Arena. After the duel ends, your state will be restored to the state you were in when you entered the Soul Arena, and there will be no side effects whatsoever.

After recovering, Ryze also started reviewing the game.

"We've almost pushed our damage output to its limit. If we can unleash 100% power of Ultimate Flash even without mana, we have a chance to defeat Simple Ryze."

Chapter 234: Quirrell Takes the Initiative

In the days that followed, Ryze practiced and tried almost every day in the Soul Arena.

However, the best result was only that Ryze's health was reduced to 5%. After arriving here, he seemed to have hit a bottleneck and could no longer make any progress.

No matter how much he tried to optimize his techniques in the Soul Arena, and how well he and Aery coordinated, Ryze was still stuck with this health bar.

"There's not much room for optimization in terms of output space. Ultimately, it's still a lack of mana. It seems I'll have to try making some potions that can increase spell power or mana."

Previously, Ryze had tried to drink an energy potion before entering the Soul Arena to increase his mana regeneration speed and a little bit of spell power, and these effects were indeed carried into the Soul Arena with him.

However, regular energy supplements are indeed less effective.

By the library window, Ryze looked at the book "Advanced Potion Making" in his hand, examining the effects of various potions and taking notes.

If he had some kind of magic or alchemical item that could increase his mana by a hundred or two, he could probably easily defeat the easy Ryze.

"Or I could ask Sirius if the Black family has any useful gadgets," Ryze thought to himself.

As he was reading, a strong smell of garlic suddenly wafted around him.

When Rizz smelled the scent, his heart skipped a beat. He then looked up at Quirrell, who was wrapped in a heavy purple turban, not far away.

"Good afternoon, Professor Quirrell. What book are you looking for at the library?"

Quirrell's gaze fell on Reiz.

At this moment, he was not as timid as usual, and his tone of voice did not seem to stutter as much.

He gave Ryze a somewhat stiff smile.

"Oh, Mr. White... Good afternoon. I'm just looking for some information about vampire defense."

"Is it for teaching? Professor Quirrell, you're really working hard," Rez said casually.

Although Quirrell's teaching consisted of reading texts aloud, and reading them with an extremely stuttering manner.

It's fair to say that Hogwarts' Defense Against the Dark Arts course this year was almost entirely taught by the students themselves.

First grade was alright. After all, Rizz and Hermione helped organize the key points, and even prepared lesson plans for Quirrell. As long as Quirrell followed the lesson plans in class, the results wouldn't be too bad.