CH952

Having ended the day seeing what a Ben clone looked like after its outer surface had melted away and enjoying a long conversation that night with Myriad about not intentionally creating plainly unethical or otherwise psychotic spells, the following day had begun as planned, meeting up with Amy, Jake, and Yuzu to go around to the last handful of locations that held people who’d managed to gain their eighth levels of magics, doing what would be his second last awakening event before the next wave would come.

And allowed him to get a fair amount of other practice and testing in as he did, forcing bands on the arms of all four of them that he repeatedly cast enchantments on and replaced with new ones at a speed that made the magic on them look blurry to anyone with the mana sense to see them while Jake was subjected to spell practice any time he wasn’t teleporting them, with Thera presently handling transportation giving the perfect room for such, exhausting the man as he did.

Focusing on a tree Ben pointed out in the distance, Jake cast his currently assigned spell before watching as the tree itself vanished, leaving a smoothly cut-off stump but nothing else, leaving the others to try and guess what happened.

“Teleported without space magic?” Amy tried, instantly wrong for the attempt.

“Nope.”

“Some sort of invisibility spell then?” Yuzu guessed, getting the same result.

“Not even close.”

“Neither of you are guessing anything horrific enough,” Thera told them, being all too aware of the horrors of her boyfriend’s mind and already having witnessed a few more in earlier spells he’d made Jake try. “It’s definitely been destroyed somehow, but there’s no way I’m getting the little details to it.”

“Well, point to Thera because ding ding ding, it’s been as destroyed as thoroughly as something can be destroyed. I’m lovingly calling this spell total erasure, and it destroys matter at an atomic level through non-affinitied magic while using the space affinity to subtly disperse the resulting release of energy for hundreds of kilometers around us so it doesn’t cause a big explosion. Considering what’s involved, it’s surprisingly not very costly either, though that is just relative to what goes into it. It takes both magics to be awakened and a few good thousand points of mana still.”

“And the drawback?” Thera wanted to know, already understanding fully well that there would in fact be one.

“Ah, well, it’s a complicated spell, but the most complicated part is the space aspect, which also means it’s the easiest to mess up. Screw up there and instead of the energy produced harmlessly dissipating around you, you’d get what we in the technical circles call ‘a big fucking explosion’. One that the caster probably isn’t going to survive.”

“… Jake, you’re never allowed to try to cast that again,” Amy told him once that subtle detail was dropped, getting no arguments for it.

“Agreed. Ben, buddy, come on. You know I’m not responsible enough for a spell like that. Even I know it.”

“Considering that I’m the one who taught you, you’d need to be really careless to screw it up… but yeah, fair. Well, if you don’t think you should, then don’t bother casting it, but for now, onto the next one and for it, we’ll be aiming at that tree right over there.”

Once more he gave his friend the necessary knowledge and once more Jake used it, showing an uncomfortable amount of excitement with that one that already put Amy on edge but before she could say anything, the tree was gone, replaced with a pillar of energy shooting directly into space with both a blinding light as well as level of heat they could still feel even as safely away from it as they were.

“A modified version of the last one,” Thera guessed before either of the other two could. “You said the other one disperses the energy? This one’s focusing and directing it.”

“Awe, Thera, you know me so well. I had him aim it at the sky for safety reasons, but if I get the chance, I’d love to see it aimed at a mountain, just to try and get a better idea of the destructive power we’re working with. In theory, it could also be possible to configure it in the next wave to use demons as the power source and direct the attack at the portal they would come through, though that creates the issue that if he misses by a bit then he’d hit anyone fighting on the other side so it might not be worth it and-”

“No,” Amy cut him off, a definitiveness in her voice that wasn’t addressing anything he was saying, instead focused entirely on the excitement she could see in her own partner’s eyes. “This falls under the same category as the last one, meaning it’s going to be just as easy to mess up. You are not doing it again.”

“Okay, but consider this,” Jake offered, desperately wanting to shoot more energy beams on that scale. “Ben knowledged me up real good so I already know how to do it perfectly, I just need a bit of practice to make sure I can keep doing it and if you’re worried about me messing up, I just need to put up some barriers around me when I do it-”

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“Barriers around everything while you do it,” Amy clarified for him. “If you can cover everything but the area you’d be shooting at, at a safe enough distance to try and reduce how bad things will go for you if you mess up, and have the mana to cast all of that safely, then we can talk.”

“Interesting, interesting. Okay, Ben, any chance you could remake my mana and buff bracelets, now that you’ve had all of your awakenings and all?”