086, 2/2

Ophiel remade the severed stone towers, as Erick practiced on the ground.

He held out his hand and channeled [Force Bomb]. A cascading ball of white light appeared in his hand; like an illusion of an explosion. It sounded of something pure and singular.

[Force Wave] looked like a pulse of expanding light, that crashed against his skin to create more ripples in the air. It sounded like a muted gong; a traveling noise. A change that radiates.

Erick switched back and forth between the two spells, trying to hear for ‘intent’. [Prime Area] was crucial to both [Shattering Light] and [Carving Radiance], and many other spells besides those, according to his recent research. As he listened to the spells, he heard how to make them combine into something highly damaging, but the ‘soaking of intent’ was something else. Something not easily garnered.

He kept trying. Somewhere in his own attempts, Kiri began channeling the same spells through her own hands, ten-or-so meters away. Ophiel and Sunny played with each other in the sky, alternatively chasing each other. Sometimes Sunny would turn clear, to ambush Ophiel, and Ophiel would turn into light, with [Lightwalk], and return the favor.

Erick moved on to other, more easily visible intentions. [Telepathy] was pure intention, it seemed. Channeling mana through that spell produced a tangle of white streamers with meter long intentioned air whipping and cracking outward. He switched back to [Force Bomb] and [Force Wave], and resumed his search.

And then he remembered his [Detect Intent Aura]. He could have kicked himself. He turned his aura on, and the world was like an ocean, while Erick, Kiri, Poi, Sunny, and Ophiel, were minor snowstorms.

Channeling mana through [Force Bomb] was like having double vision. The white explosion of light was mirrored with another layer of power directly on top of the first. Erick focused on that unseen layer.

After another half an hour, he had separated that layer from the original; expanded it by a fraction larger than original white.

Erick played around with the spell. He eventually found success when he channeled the barest bit of mana into the spell; one point every second. It sounded nothing like the pure notes he was used to seeing, but it worked to see intent, without the mana glow obscuring it all.

He held an invisible explosion on his hand that was only visible with his [Detect Intent Aura] active.

He tried the same with [Force Wave], and found great success. A ring of expanded power gonged from Erick’s hand and crashed in every direction. [Force Wave] was the foundation for almost all scanning magic, so that made sense that the resulting intent of the spell was much larger than normal. Almost all of [Force Wave] was intent.

Erick smiled, as he said to himself, “[Force Bomb] is like a mallet that will trigger a [Force Wave] gong in an area, to soak the mana in that location with intent, to make it more responsive.” He smiled, saying, “Magic is just so awesome.”

He pointed at the remade stone tower in the distance, focused on what he wanted, and cast.

[Force Bomb]. [Force Wave].

A nearly-invisible point of white light shot forward to strike the tower with a silent explosion. Whatever change happened over there was out of Erick’s sight, and way too far for [Detect Intent Aura] to function, but a blue box appeared, confirming that he had done it correctly.

 

 

Erick said, “Now! The big question: Is that the good version?” He looked up [Prime Area] in the Script.

 

 

“Oh yeah. That’s the good version.” Erick called over, “Kiri! How’s your magic going?”

Kiri’s eyes looked into nothing. Erick looked up. Sunny was gone. Ophiel was gone—

Nope. Ophiel was floating over by the stone tower, next to Sunny. Erick slipped his senses into Ophiel and turned on [Detect Intent Aura]. From his vantage point above, the entire stone tower was awash in bright white intent, like a fog holding in the air. Wind from the north rolled the mana down south, like a moving sea that rubbed against Erick’s intent like waves washing over a sand castle. It wouldn’t be long until Erick’s magic was destroyed by natural forces.

Erick came back to himself.

Kiri called out, asking, “[Force Bomb] is the mallet, eh?”

“I guess!”

Erick moved on to the next part of the spell.

Mana Alter had a lot of parts to that blue box.

 

 

All of the parts of the Skill were for transforming Force into something else. This was normal. Force was one of the most blank-slate parts of magic. But according to what Erick had just seen, Force was also what came after intent.

 

Maybe Erick had that wrong. Maybe he did not. But the point was, was that Mana Altering a spell like [Prime Area] into Light, as the recipe called for, seemed like it was missing a step. You could only alter Force into Light, right? Not intent into light? Or had Erick, by virtue of casting a ‘blank’ spell like [Prime Area], made a different sort of Force spell?

Oh. Wait. Yup. That’s exactly what he had done.

Back to experimenting!

He channeled mana through the Light part of Mana Altering, and immediately blinded himself as his hand flashed to brilliance. He yelped and turned away, cutting off the flow of mana. After a moment, when his eyes cleared of bright dots, he turned on [Lightwalk], and tried again. He couldn’t be blinded as a person made of light, after all.

There was an immediate complication.

He couldn’t rightly channel mana through his hand like this; he had no hand to channel through, just the facsimile of a hand. And when he did try to channel mana, all he got was brighter. He could still cast his other spells in [Lightwalk] form, and spells like [Force Beam] still came out of where his ‘hand’ was, but using [Lightwalk] was obviously not a solution to the blinding problem of light magic. He dropped [Lightwalk] and conjured a lightmask on the upper button of his shirt, encapsulating his head, to block out half of all light.

This time, channeling mana through Mana Altering: Light produced a brilliant spill of radiance, but he did not blind himself. With [Detect Intent Aura] active, he even saw the intent in that radiance, like an overlapping image. But it was not an overlapping image of just one intent. Erick saw at least two. With focus, and time, and a very careful trickle of mana, he separated those two larger prominences into the light aspect, and the blinding aspect; like splitting a hair.

From there, it was the work of a few casts and combinations, directed at the stone tower in the distance, to see if he was working the spell right, followed by a concentrated moment to produce the first blue box, and then directly after to produce the other version, focused the other way.

 

 

 

[Light Shift] set the stone tower aglow, like it was a neon sign flipped on in a bar. [Blinding Shift] didn’t seem to do much, but upon asking Poi, it apparently made the tower uncomfortable to look at; like staring at the sun, but without the brightness.

Erick said, “I knew Mana Altering could be used multiple times in the same combination to make vastly different spells, but I didn’t think it would work quite like that.” He smiled. “Neat.” He called over to Kiri, “Hey, Kiri!”

Kiri looked up from her green glowing hand. “Yeah?”

“Do you know anything about splitting Mana Alters into their component pieces?”

Kiri dropped her hand, and began walking closer, asking, “Did you not get to that at Oceanside?”

“Nope.”

She said, “Some of the splits are more useful than others…”

Kiri spoke of a few different aspects of magic that Erick did not fully know. Splitting Mana Alters between the Elemental side of the ability, and the Affliction side of the ability, was necessary for producing light which did not blind, which was great against shadow monsters while remaining easy on the eyes of your fellow mages, or cheaper cost fire magic, where the energy of the spell was focused on the damage over time, instead of on the increased instant damage that was common to fire magic. The splitting of Decay into smaller pieces was a fundamental necessity for Poison Mages…

Eventually, Kiri just said, “But mostly, splitting the effects lessens the outcome. But it does reduce the cost.” She added, “I know we have books on this?”

“Yeah, yeah. But I didn’t read them yet.”

Kiri smiled.

Erick went back to his spellwork.

[Force Shrapnel] and Mana Altering for Light, but skipping the blinding aspects, produced a decent spell.

 

 

Trying again, but going for blinding, produced:

 

 

Trying again, but with both aspects of Mana Altering for Light at the same time, produced:

 

 

Erick laughed as the sun dipped down in the west. It was not sunset, it wasn’t even twilight. But it was getting late. He would continue for a little longer; he did not want to be out here at night.

I think I know which is the better choice for the next part.

Erick wrapped [Light Shift] together with [Riven Light] and pointed. A dot of brightness flew out from his fingertip like a laser pointer turning on, to crash into the stone tower in the distance. The tower and a large area around the tower flickered to neon white. Cracks formed immediately. In two moments, the tower collapsed into broken boulders of light, like a grocery store pyramid of oranges spilling outward.

A blue box appeared.

 

 

The boulders of light glowed bright for a little while, possibly the full minute according to the box, but some of the smaller ones turned back to normal orange stone well before the larger ones.

As the glow fully vanished, Erick inspected the destruction from the air, from Ophiel. [Breaking Light] had not been as destructive as it appeared. When Erick had raised those stone towers from the ground, he had made them solid; five meters thick at the bottom, ten meters high, and four meters wide at the top.

[Breaking Light] had turned an apparent two meters of the surface of the tower into boulders made of light. The tower itself had been reduced to a five meter tall, thin spire, surrounded by irregularly shaped boulders.

This was why [Shattering Light] called for Mana Shaping for 500 and [Lightshape]; in order to penetrate the entire area, and make an actually damaging spell; a pile of boulders wasn’t going to do much, now was it?

Now that he saw the spell for what it could be, Erick had Ophiel rebuild the towers, while he played around with [Breaking Light]. After a few rebuilds and breakings, he prepared for the real deal.

As the sun dipped down, casting the sky into purples and reds and gold, Erick pointed at a fresh orange tower in the distance.

Mana Shaping. [Lightshape]. [Breaking Light].

The tower cracked like a frozen pond, then broke, then shattered, all at once. The entire structure and ten meters of ground beyond turned to light and separated in all directions. Gravel became a sudden storm of hail that buried itself into the dirt far further than Erick would have thought possible, leaving tiny glowing craters absolutely everywhere.

Some of the shrapnel sailed overhead, and crashed near Erick’s feet.

Kiri ducked, “Shit!”

Erick laughed, unmoving. “We’re way too far away to get hit, Kiri.” He added, “I mean. We could, theoretically, but—” A falling pebble struck him in the shoulder. His [Personal Ward] easily soaked the damage, but he had Ophiel cast a low-strength [Prismatic Ward] across the group, anyway. No need to risk a critical hit to the eye, or anything like that. Erick said, “I stand corrected. It didn’t really hurt, though.” As a new blue box appeared, Erick said, “It’s not really meant to harm people.”

 

 

Erick said, “It says right here, ‘Deals double damage to dark and shadow aspect creatures and objects.’ Pretty good, I think.”

Glowing hail plinked against the [Prismatic Ward] and the ground around Erick, Kiri, and Poi.

Sunny, however, was outside the shield, flying around, dodging falling glows like it was a fun game. After a moment of indecisive padding around on Erick’s shoulder, Ophiel took to the sky and joined Sunny’s games.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Erick exploded the final two towers he had yet to touch, causing even more glowing pebbles to fall across the twilight sky.

The mimics nearby didn’t seem to care about the light-aspect magic. The glowing rocks must have plinked into every mimic for two hundred meters, but the mimics did not move. They just shook their leaves to dislodge the glowing gravel and went on pretending to be agave.

 

– – – –

 

Back at home, Teressa had made a nice dinner, and it was time to eat.

Afterward, Erick went back to his library and cracked open a few books he had barely read before. ‘Mana Altering for the Beginner’, and ‘Mana Altering for the Practitioner’; the two Arcanaeum Consortium approved books for the beginner mage, meant for classes Erick had never chosen to take. While he read, he channeled mana through Mana Altering, dissecting the Skill into pieces, trying to understand everything it was capable of accomplishing. The books had a few experiments to try, and Erick tried a few of the less destructive ones, and while some of them were helpful in understanding something he didn’t already know, none of the two books seemed to say anything about channeling mana through the Skill, to listen and witness the magic how Erick was doing. None of them spoke about what Erick had seen with his [Detect Intent Aura], either.

Erick brought that up with Kiri, the next morning. “So why doesn’t anyone channel mana through the skill to listen to it? Or use a [Detect Intent Aura]?”

Kiri yawned as she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, asking, “Did you stay awake all night? Again?”

“Doesn’t matter. And I took a break to make some more rings. Answer the questions.”

Kiri chuckled, sleepily, then looked over what Erick was reading. “Check higher level books?” She added, “But your methods don’t really work that well for me, so I doubt it would work for many. Nothing of what you do is normal technique, Erick. Besides! A lot of books are written with Scions of Willpower in mind, and they can’t endlessly channel magic all day long like you can.” She shrugged, jostling Sunny on her shoulders, saying, “If it weren’t for your success, I’d say you were doing everything wrong.”

Erick grumbled, “Mmm.” He looked down at his book for a moment longer, then snapped it shut and set it aside. He stood, saying, “If it’s morning it’s time to make more magic.”

Kiri asked, “Time for breakfast, first?”

“Of course!”

Kiri smiled, saying, “Good. I’ll make cinnamon pancakes.”

“I already made the batter and scrambled the eggs.” Erick said, “I was just waiting for others to get up.”