orthoros
patreon
126 - Fun With Magic
🕑 Added 2024-02-04 03:02:57 +0000 UTCThe day after my fight with Prince Tempus I awoke in my bed back in Lophan. The details of what happened after the fight were somewhat blurry, a massive bout of depression being all that I remembered. Now, I looked back at yesterday with an odd feeling, not entirely certain why I acted the way I did. What I did know was that I’d been somewhat fucked up mentally ever since I got to this layer. No wait, it probably started way before that, I just never noticed, or rather, decided not to. This episode was just the most recent one in a series of cascading events. And once again, as I lay there under my gooped-up sheets, I wondered if I should seek out professional help.
These thoughts whirled around in my head for a while until I decided that I was fine.
I had been aware of this newer addiction of mine for a long time now and recently things just got a bit worse. I was also starting to suspect that these bouts of uncontrollable battle lust were some sort of withdrawal symptoms. Ever since I got resurrected, I had been fighting almost non-stop. This changed recently when I joined the Asphons and their civilizations. Compared to before, I almost didn’t spend any time fighting. I was reminded of my days as a gambler.
I did try to stop several times, somewhat aware that I was going down a bad path. It always resulted in the same outcome, though. Once I’d gone a few days, or even weeks, without going to the casino, I would be overcome by a mighty need to the point of physically feeling ill. And, well, shortly after I would find myself exiting the casino, having lost all of my money.
So, thinking I knew what was happening, I decided I was fine. This was normal. I wouldn’t want to waste a therapist's time with something that I was aware of. I would just need to set my expectations appropriately in the future. Clearly, a T9 monster wasn’t much of a challenge anymore. It kind of sucked, but it was what it was. Hopefully, I would encounter something even stronger in the future, where I could battle my heart out. And if I didn’t… well, I would have to deal with it.
With a sigh, I threw back my bedsheets. They stuck to the wall due to the mucus and I just left them there. We had mainly given up on cleaning the bed, simply exchanging the entire thing about once a week. The mucus didn’t bother me all that much either, so it was fine like that. I leisurely made my way down into the living room, finding Andrius sitting on a couch reading a book.
“Morning,” I called out as I made my way closer to him, employing my “creepy” tentacle walk. “Just you today?”
“Good morning, Gary,” Andrius closed his book and gave me his full attention. “Just me, the others are out dealing with… stuff. How are you feeling today?”
“Fine,” I replied as casually as I could. I could hear the worry in his voice, which was understandable. Yesterday must have been weird for them too. “Just went through a little low yesterday.”
“A little, yes,” Andrius seemed intent on not pushing the issue. “I’m supposed to tell you that the corpse is still where you left it, heavily guarded so it doesn’t get eaten by random monsters. We know you like to eat your kills, but Lophan has requested permission to analyze it before you do. Completely up to you, though. Oh, and Redax said his offer still stands, whatever that means.”
“It’s fine if Lophan wants to study the worm,” I couldn’t help but call it that since it turned out to be a disappointment. “I get what Redax meant, don’t worry about it.”
He did offer to listen to my problems back when I was clearing the road, but did I really want to talk to him? I already didn’t want to bother a professional, and it felt wrong to offload everything onto somebody I considered a friend. If anything, talking to Redax might be harder than talking to somebody I didn’t know at all.
“Congratulations on completing the city quest, as well,” Andrius trucked on. “It was quite the spectacle to watch from the city. A lot of people who saw you fight for the first time were really impressed. Hell, even I couldn’t help but marvel at the way you fling around spells of that magnitude as if they were F-tier spells.”
“You know how it is, the system helps a lot with the casting, after that, it’s just a matter of knowing the spell and having the mana reserves to back it up.”
“I guess that’s true,” Andrius shrugged his shoulders. “Speaking of which, since it’s going to be a week until you can generate another quest, why don’t we continue with your spellcasting training? You know? The one where you cast manually?”
“Oh,” I perked up a bit. That would actually be a great distraction to take my mind off of my current mindset. I’ve wanted to continue with this for a while now, especially since our last session was rudely interrupted by my sleep tonic running out of juice. “I think I would like that. How do we continue from where we left off last time?”
“I’d recommend hitting the books again, for now,” Andrius put his book down on a nearby coffee table and stood up. “Recap what you learned last time and go a bit more into depth. Then we go out to experiment again.”
“Sounds good to me, as long as you’re willing to read the books to me.”
“And maybe we’ll throw some reading exercises into the mix. You know, just for fun.”
“Yeah… maybe.”
====================================================================
I once again found myself outside of Lophans city walls, accompanied by Andrius and Redax. We’d spent the last two days in Andrius’ favorite library going over magical theory and occasionally perusing a kid's book on how to read. When I voiced my intent to actually practice some of what I learned, Redax was the only one who decided to join us, just like last time. The silent Asphon hadn’t pressed the issue of wanting to let me vent, but I felt like he was nearby a lot more often, probably to show me that he was available whenever I felt like it.
“Alright, as we discussed, we’ll have you perform two spells for now. Instead of modifications of spells you already know, these will be entirely new to you, and therefore harder to cast,” Andrius had a clipboard with him and was ready to record my results. We talked it over and decided on two relatively easy spells to use this time around. He also kept going on about wanting to show me a neat trick afterward, so I was looking forward to whatever he had in store for me. “Why don’t you start with the E-tier spell: Firewall?”
“Alright,” on a rock next to me, I had two print-outs containing the spell matrix for the two spells I was going to cast today. I grabbed the paper with the firewall spell and went over the matrix one last time. “I will begin casting… now.”
Andrius hit the button of a stopwatch behind me as I started slowly constructing the spell matrix. While it wasn’t a terribly complicated spell, it was still a step up from the magical bolt that I experimented with last time. Just like last time, doing it without any assistance from the system was hard. Actually, it felt even harder this time around. Andrius had warned me about this happening since I was trying to cast a spell of a higher tier, which made it harder to construct and maintain the spell matrix.
Still, according to him, I had it easy compared to most other mages due to my magical singularity passive. As I struggled through the creation process, I couldn’t help but wonder just why it was so difficult to manually cast spells. Either the system was actively interfering because it didn’t want us to be able to do this, or it was this hard to begin with and the system was some sort of saint for helping us out. Whatever the case, I shouldn’t let my mind wander. I cross-referenced the paper occasionally, carefully assembling the needed runes and slotting them into the framework.
Only to have a small magical explosion blow up in my face.
“Four minutes, twenty-four seconds,” Andrius called out while jotting down the details of the attempt. “Result: Matrix collapse. Good. You know, I would have been really pissed off if you got this one on your first try as well.”
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” I chuckled. The explosion had been so small that it posed no threat at all and I could jump straight into my next attempt. This time, I would have to keep my mind from wandering. “Starting the second attempt… now.”
Once again I began constructing the spell matrix. I had gained a little bit of experience from my last attempt which made this one marginally easier. Instead of wondering about the system and all of the things I’d learned over the past two days, I completely focused on the task at hand. More than once I had to remind myself that slow and steady won the race, keeping myself from rushing ahead. The goal wasn’t to cast the spell as fast as possible, rather, it was to cast the spell at all.
I was about three-fourths of the way to completion when I made another mistake, causing the mana contained in the spell matrix to violently explode. Again, since there was barely any mana needed to cast a spell of this level the explosion wasn’t threatening at all. At worst it felt like some martial arts guy punching me in the face, which by my standards nowadays didn’t even register as an attack.
“Five Minutes, thirty-two seconds,” Andrius called out. There was no doubt in my mind that if Orbos was here, these two would be betting on my chances of success constantly.
I didn’t pay the peanut gallery too much mind and after studying the matrix once again, started on my next attempt. When I was about halfway through, an odd feeling came over me. It almost felt as if something was tickling my brain, urging me to go a bit faster. The weird sensation startled me and I immediately dropped my current attempt and jumped back a few meters, looking around for anything out of the ordinary.
“Three minutes, ten seconds,” Andrius called out. “Is something wrong? Why did you jump like that?”
I held off on answering for a second as I tried processing what had happened, idly noting that Redax had moved right next to me. He must have thought there was some kind of threat and jumped in. How reliable.
“It’s… nothing,” I said slowly. “I just got this fucked up feeling like somebody was tickling my brain while casting the spell.”
“Like somebody was tickling your brain? What?” Andrius looked at me like I had gone crazy. “Do you think it was some kind of mental attack?” Now he started looking around as well.
“I don’t think so, no,” I got back to my earlier position right next to my notes. “I got a skill protecting me from stuff like that. If I had to guess it was some weird side effect of magical singularity. It felt like it was trying to guide me a bit.”
“So what, you think the system is trying to assist you with manual casting now? That’s just blatant cheating at this point. I’m going to call the guards on you,” Andrius looked tempted to actually do it as well.
“Aren’t you guys technically guards as well?” I asked with an amused undertone.
“Hey, that’s right! Come over here so I can smack you!” Andrius gestured for me to come over to him, which I blatantly ignored.
“Why don’t you come over here if you want to smack me that much?” I challenged him. “Come, get some poison mucus on you, I made it just for you.”
“On second thought, Redax, go smack him over the head for me, will you?”
“No.”
“You guys are no fun…” Andrius pouted but picked his clipboard back up again after he had thrown it to the ground in frustration. “Ready for the next attempt.”
I once again had to start from scratch, carefully creating a framework for the runes to slot into. For some odd reason, this was the easiest part of creating a spell matrix, even though it looked to be a lot more complex than the runes that would fill it up eventually. Nobody really knew why it was like this, the best guess being that there was no “intent” behind the frame, while the runes did.
This time, the weird feeling came even earlier, about one-third into the spell. Having expected it to happen again, I was able to keep concentrating on the spell. I stopped dead in my tracks, focusing on keeping the matrix stable while I tried figuring out what the weird sensation was and what it wanted me to do. It felt like there was another train of thought in my head as if my thinking had split in two. The other part was full of information about the firewall spell, magical theory, runes and their intent, and tips and tricks on how to weave a matrix more efficiently.
It felt like an amazing wellspring of information, with the slight problem that it was incredibly fleeting and hard to grasp. It was too much information to accurately sort through and identify, flitting by in an instant before vanishing again. There was information that I knew for a fact I didn’t know, making me certain that this was my magical singularity skill doing… something. I was so absorbed in this new sensation that I completely forgot about what I was doing, dropping the spell once again.
“One minute, fifty-three seconds. Come on, you’re getting worse, somehow,” Andrius called out while making a note. “Focus.”
“Sorry, I’m trying to sort out and work with whatever my skill is trying to tell me or make me do, or whatever this is,” I explained. “Shit’s weird. Going in again.”
It took me another five attempts before I got a vague grasp on how to use these weird snippets of information to my advantage. Instead of actively trying to decipher what it was trying to tell me, I was better off letting it take a backseat in my mind. As I continued to craft the spell matrix I occasionally got a flash of inspiration, helping me out with whatever I was doing at the time and making the whole process just a little easier. It was actually a rather enjoyable experience once I got used to it. Almost like having an ancient wizard whispering helpful information to his student.
Finally, the completed spell matrix was before me and I eagerly filled it with mana before casting the spell in front of me. A wall of flame erupted about three meters away from me, marking my first success. The wall was actually a little sad due to its small size, making me wonder if it even had any practical use. Well, it was an E-tier spell, so I shouldn’t be expecting too much in the first place. The important thing was that I managed to cast the spell!
“Six minutes, twelve seconds,” Andrius called out. “How’s the brain-tickling coming along?”
“Pretty good I think,” I replied while looking at the burning wall of fire. Something about knowing that I manually cast the spell made it more impressive. More… fulfilling. I had been fascinated by magic from the very beginning but something had always felt a bit off. But this? This was what magic was all about. “I think it’ll be beneficial in the future. Maybe I can even train it to be stronger or something.”
“While it irks me to no end, I’m looking forward to seeing some results,” Andrius said. “Now, do you want to try and improve your time or do you want to try the other spell?”
“I think I want to cast firewall a few more times before moving on, get a bit more proficient with it,” I said, watching my spell flicker and end. “Improving the time is secondary, I’m more concerned about the “brain-tickling”, to be honest.”
“Understandable,” Andrius shrugged. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Nodding at Andrius, I once again started casting firewall. I had one more failed spell matrix, but after that I managed to cast the spell five times in a row, always managing to improve my time by a little. I also got better at listening to the whispers of my skill, able to more clearly separate the indistinct mess of intent and half-formed ideas from my own thoughts. After that, I moved on to the other spell on todays itinerary. Wind Gust, another E-tier spell.
This time it only took me two tries to successfully cast the spell, much to Andrius’s surprise. Having some experience with manually casting another E-tier spell definitely helped, not to mention the odd support I got from my skill. The fact that I was getting help from my skill technically meant that the system was helping me out a bit. Yet, at the same time, it didn’t feel like system support at all. Casting a system-learned spell was a little bit like pushing a button and waiting until the system did most of the work for me. The support I was getting here felt like the system was actually teaching me how to do the things it was usually doing for me.
The magical singularity skill became more and more mysterious the more I learned about it, and I couldn’t help but wonder what else it had in store for me in the future.
I took the time to cast wind gust a few more times to practice until I felt comfortable with it as well. “So about that thing you wanted to show me,” I turned around to ask Andrius. I felt like having done all I could for today and couldn’t contain my curiosity anymore.
“Oh, you’re going to like this!” Andrius hopped off the stone he’d been sitting on, setting down his clipboard. He walked over to me and started to go into full lecture mode. “So, we’ve talked about this before, but you have managed to cast two different spells at the same time before, right.”
“Sure,” I nodded my head. “It’s a bit more difficult than just spamming the same spell over and over, but I quite regularly prepare a spell while casting something else, or mix in a few poison spells while I’m sending out void javelins.”
“Well, what if I told you, that you can combine two different spells to imitate the effects of a spell of a higher tier?” Andrius spread his arms as if the information he was presenting was a gift from god.
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” I readily agreed. I’ve had the idea before, way back when I got my mutation that let me mix my two types of mana together. Unfortunately, none of my spells really meshed well together. Sure, if I used the mixed mana the spells changed, but that wasn’t exactly the same as combining two spells to make something more.
“Oh, I thought you’d love this,” Andrius deflated a bit.
“I definitely love the idea of it, and that according to you it is actually doable,” I placated the poor guy a bit. “But it’s not like I’d never thought of it. You’ve confirmed my suspicions is all. I’m assuming you can demonstrate?”
“Even better!” Andrius tutted and wiggled his finger at me. “I’m giving you… homework!”
“Oh no,” I instantly deflated at the mention of homework. Sure it was magic, and I loved magic, so I probably wouldn’t mind. Yet, sighing at homework was like a Pavlovian response at this point, as I’m sure it was for children all across the world. “What is it?”
“The two spells I made you learn, firewall and wind gust, actually have the potential to combine!” Andrius said slyly. “Your homework is to manually cast both of them at the same time. Combining these two spells will have just about the same effect as casting the D-tier spell Flame Thrower!”
“Man, I hate homework,” I used a tentacle to kick away a pebble, barely able to contain my grin. “But I’ll work hard, Mr. Teacher.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Andrius snapped his fingers and turned to look at Redax who had been standing close by like a statue for the past hour. “Now, how about we go grab something to eat? My treat!”
“The day has yet to come where I deny an invitation to free dinner, count me in,” I replied happily, looking forward to getting some grub into me. Sure, I had close to no taste buds and everything I ate disappeared into my gluttony skill, providing no nutrients whatsoever, but a free meal was a free meal.
“Likewise,” Redax said, moving toward the city gate at a sedate pace.
Today had been pretty fun, all things considered, and I was looking forward to continuing my studies in manual casting. But now, it was time for a break, and in a scant few days, it would be time to generate another city quest.
