This week for Magic Mondays, we bring you an explosive defensive array.
Today we give you the Flame Ward array.
Notation: Transmute Copper, Gold, Iron, Lead, Silver, Tin and Wood into Fire and Push the Fire at a speed of 4m/s. The Fire excludes Water.
Description: An unsubtle name for an unsubtle array. The Flame Ward array takes the idiom of “a best defence is a good offence” to heart and makes every attack on the bearer of this array a lethal risk.
At its core, it is a very simple array. It transmutes a variety of materials (those most often used to create weapons and projectiles) into fire. As a defensive array, this is par of the course. You can have the array transmute the materials into air, light, sound, water and it will protect you just as well. The Flame Ward, as its name implies, has a specific use for the fire and that is to fling it back at the enemy.
After the materials have been transmuted into fire, this fire is then pushed away from the array at a speed of four metres per second. This shows how this array was meant to be used on shields for melee combat, since if you are within striking distance of a person, you are definitely within four metres and that means a ball of flame will take less than a second to make it back to you.
For ranged combat, this array is less than ideal. Over any significant range, the fire will take far too long and will die out before it hits the attacker, although a skilled user might be able to angle to fire to a closer enemy. At the very least, the array will still protect you from incoming projectiles.
The other unique bit about this array is that the fire excludes water. This means that while the fire is inside the array’s area of effect, it cannot touch water. Not useful until you remember that this means that water cannot touch it either, meaning it is unquenchable as long as the fire remains inside the array’s area of effect.