Chapter 55 | Set Up Shop

Theo was sitting in a corner of the outpost they had just built, inspecting his mind palace. Since departing from the village, he had been trying to figure out some new spells, and was having great success with it.

For now, Theo had several limitations in his spell-casting.

The fundamental limitation was that his mana couldn’t magically change into different materials. The fire gem helped him create fire mana, but he couldn’t create dirt, water, or air. For that, he had to utilize his surroundings.

The major problem with this was the fact that the environment didn’t always stay the same. Different locations would enable him to use different spells.

The next problem was his inability to control spells after they left his body. He could only pre-program them to follow a certain course of actions. Although he could adjust this on the go, it needed a bit of time to set up. If he wanted to do it quickly. He would have to completely abandon controlling his body and pull back the second half of his consciousness to increase that speed.

But he had managed to overcome those problems to an acceptable degree. After the fight against the bandit gang near the village, he had noticed many problems in his fighting style and noted down what he needed to improve on.

The first point he had focused on had been the modularity of his spells. The first versions he had created were nowhere near modular enough, and after several adjustments to their spell formulas, they could now be used in a more adaptable way.

For example, his fireball spell.

[Ball Shape(Size:Small-Medium-Large-Custom)]

He had started by adding the ability to change its size. He had created a valve mechanism that acted more like a switch. It could go from small, which was about half the size of his normal, head-sized fireball. Medium, which didn’t have a size difference, and large, which was two times bigger.

Using the custom side of his spell was a bit more complicated as he had to pick and write a word. He had tried using numbers, but not only he couldn’t figure out how to make it work, he also couldn’t quantify the medium-sized fireball properly.

So instead, he had chosen to use words like tiny, extra small, huge, massive, or gargantuan. Though, the word huge had caused him to release a human sized fireball and spend about half of his mana in one go. It had also caused several issues with the rest of the spell formula.

[Package]

This was the same, making the fireball an actual coherent ball.

[Exit]

This inscription of the spell was where the fire gem came into play. The ball of mana that had been conjured in the inscriptions would form and travel through a pipe he had connected to the middle of the room. It would interact with the fire gem there and change in property before following another pipe back to the next inscription.

This was actually where the huge size setting had started causing problems. The pipe Theo had conjured wasn’t big enough to accommodate such a spell, therefore causing a bottleneck and slowing down the conjuring process of the spell massively. Not to mention, the fire gem seemed to have a certain limitation to its ability of conversion. So he couldn’t run an infinite amount of fire mana through it.

Presumably, he would have to spend minutes of time to conjure a fireball with the Massive or Gargantuan size. Provided that he could even afford the spell.

He could increase the size of his pipes, but that was a matter that would need quite a bit of time. He had no spare bricks and didn’t want to tear down his walls.

[Entry]

From here, the fire mana ball would sink back into the inscriptions and turn into a non-conjured state.

[Ignite]

After being ignited, the fireball would travel through wherever he wanted, either to be lobbed away like a rock or be rotated in his forearm to accumulate speed and launched like a proper spell.

His other main attack spell, flamethrower had actually been split into two different spells.

[Torrent Shape]

[Continuous]

These two both gave shape to the spell and made it constant, keeping it active as long as Theo fed mana into the formula.

[Exit]

[Entry]

[Valve]

After being passed through the gem, the mana would become of fire-affinity and pass through the valve. The valve could be used to adjust the amount of fire mana being released.

[Spray]

As it could be seen there was no ignition added to the spell formula. Instead, the current flamethrower spell would only release the fire-affinity mana, equivalent to spraying the enemy with highly-flammable gas.

Theo had prepared another spell called ignite, which would simply light the mana on fire. Although it would only do so for the fire-mana still in contact with him, this would cause the flames to cascade and spread, almost like a gas-leak explosion.

Although it was technically the same spell, he could now use the flamethrower in different ways. As long as the enemy didn’t have mana sense, they would only see him lift his hand and a bizarre wave of energy pass over them. Before they could even react, the mana would be lit on fire.

Alongside improving these two, Theo had also developed a few new spells.

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Shrapnel Burst was mostly an upgrade of the Crackle Shot. Theo would place his hand on the ground, mana tendrils would seep into the earth just like in Earthen Spike, then raise a ball of dirt from the ground. He would then heat the ball of dirt, fill it full of flames and chuck it across. Even a small impact would cause it to explode into a cloud of superheated micro-particles.

…Is this a war crime?

There was always the chance of the dust ball exploding before reaching its destination, so this was a bit of an unstable spell.

Mud Pit was a spell that turned the area around him into, well… A mud pit. It had a similar effect to those quicksand pools in some cartoons. He would use the water in his pouches for the spell.