It was hard to pull myself away from the comfy bed and senseless videos, but I had said I would be trying to use magic again tonight, so I begrudgingly left my apartment.

Once I was out and moving again, I felt much better. I was still sore from the running and unintentional stops, but at this point it was more of a good sore. Since I was still irked by how close I was to actually being able to make ULE boosting useful, I tried to do it while walking.

As expected, it really only ended up popping a few inches off the ground towards the end of each step. Walking doesn’t lend itself to pushing hard especially in the forwards direction, so with a flash of inspiration, I started skipping.

I felt conflicted at how skipping was by far the most effective gait to use boosting with. While it might have simply been my greater familiarity with the concept, I think that the slight jumping motion helped me get into the right headspace to appropriately increase the kinetic energy I was applying.

With running and walking, you ideally want to smoothly transition between each step to conserve the most energy, using a little to load up your tendons. Due to my not so great control, I had been absorbing either not enough or way too much. On the other hand, when you skip, the harder landing into your forwards foot- as opposed to over it as with running- let me convert all of that energy without breaking the flow. Putting the energy back in wasn’t much different from running or walking, but that wasn’t really the part I had problems with.

So why was I apprehensive about using boosting this way?

Well, first off and more practically, even if I could use boosting without needing to already be going fast, not having steady footing could be an issue in combat. Landing wrong could twist my ankle or cause me to lose grip- both things you really don’t want to have happen when fighting demons.

Second: it's skipping. It looks goofy and childish regardless of its niche effectiveness. While I didn’t have an idea of how I wanted to present myself as an MG to the world, neither of those adjectives were ones I wanted associated with me.

After a little more enhanced-skipping practice, I went back to walking normally since the field was getting close. While I was certain that my escapades would circulate the entire facility eventually, I was hesitant to show what I had been practicing. Some lingering self-doubt or fear of it being used against me- the same that was the reason I withheld so many of my perks. Not the healthiest habit, but certainly an old and stubborn one.

Once everyone had said their greetings, we all got to our respective practices. At least I think that the concrete barriers Potato was juggling were for training, but they could have just been bored.

Like before, trying to get the smoke to move in any way was met with stubborn refusal. Following vague intuition, I stopped trying to manipulate the smoke and focused on the still-billowing canister. The connection was stronger here, and I could feel some sort of desire from it. That might not have been the best way to describe it, but where the smoke was unresponsive and stable, the remaining reactants felt welcoming to the possibility of reacting sooner.

A bit frustrated from the failure of my earlier attempts, I went against the apparent wishes of the contents of the grenade and imposed my will to smother and choke it. Almost immediately, it stopped emitting the smoke and I felt some pressure against my magic. Rebecca, who had been casually watching me, perked up at this and asked, “did you stop it?”

“Yeah. The smoke doesn’t want to do anything, but I was able to hinder its creation. There's some resistance and I can feel my ULE reserves slowly draining, but it feels stable.”

With a sigh, she responded, “damn. It’s day two… I guess your sight setup is helping with the ULE connection a lot more than I thought. Even with that in mind you're getting this too fast. Whatever..” After a quick pause to shake her head, she asked, “can you do the opposite?”

With a shrug, I stopped holding the reaction back- letting the little bit that was still going propagate back to where it was before my intervention. I could sense some relief from the chemicals, so I grasped that connection and pushed as much ULE as I could into it.

Even on the closest level of perception I could get with my sight, I shouldn’t have been able to see a reaction happening on a molecular level, but through my connection to what was going on in the grenade, I knew that the ULE I was pushing into it was subtly manipulating each of the reactants to near-perfectly hit each other then clear out when they had finished reacting.

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The outward result of this was that the slow billowing of smoke became a weak jet that started spinning the canister around its wind enclosure.

By the time everything had reacted, I was out of breath and nearly out of ULE- having been too enraptured by what I was doing to notice how much energy it was using up. As I laid down where I had been sitting, I heard Rebecca ask, “that should have given you a good idea of what your magic can do- mind if I ask you to explain it?”

Not bothering to sit up, I wearily waved off her trepidation, “I guess I can catalyze or hinder a reaction? But like way more than should be feasible. It also takes a shit ton of ULE to go that hard with it.”

“Can’t say I’ve seen something exactly like that before, but it could have some fun applications. Just want to make sure- no kinesis of any kind?”

Quickly using up the ULE I had gathered during our conversation, I tried getting the smoke to move and once again failed badly enough to not even burn the ULE I had been using. “Maybe I’ll be able to do it later- for now… actually let me try something.”

Instead of trying to get the cloud to move, I lightly imparted one area with generic ‘do something’ energy while selecting another area to be affected with ‘do nothing.’ The results were barely noticeable, simply being a slight bias towards the area of greater reactivity where… stuff formed and probably stopped being a gas. Or maybe it was bleaching the grass. The grass was getting lighter, but I couldn’t see fine enough to tell if stuff was falling on or reacting with it.

Once again out of juice, I sighed, “that’s about it for now. I definitely would like to move it around- looks really convenient. And would help me be less indiscriminate with what I attacked or reliant on the direction of the wind.”

Shaking her head, Rebecca said, “it’s a start for sure. I still can’t believe it’s day two of you doing this… Are you sure you haven't been altered to be better at this?”

“No?”

“What do you mean ‘no?’ Wouldn’t you be aware if your brain was resculpted?”

“Well, when I was getting my horns mounted into my skull, there would have been some time for nanites to mess around. I don’t know if Cleo did that or not since I didn’t know it was a thing that was doable until yesterday- but I haven't asked.”

“Don’t bother. Unless your Semiseelie is some sort of comparative savant of forward-thinking and rule bending, they wouldn’t have dared think to throw something extra into a deal they made. Mine’s a bit looser than normal and tells me if I’m overpaying for a perk before I buy it, but I’ve heard there’s some that nickel-and-dime their MGs.”

Confused, I asked, “aren’t they here to help us?”

“Well, yeah, but some are a bit more traditionalist than others. I’m pretty sure they subsist off making good deals and contracts or something. They definitely don’t eat or even breathe. Plus the whole only-being-on-our-plane-of-existence-for-short-periods-of-time thing.”

“Huh.”

“...”

“...”

Breaking up the silence, I pushed away my uncertainty by telling myself that they’d hear about it soon anyways and said, “I’ve been messing around with using ULE for other things besides my perks or magic as you described.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“Well since ULE is basically just ‘generic potential energy,’ I tried to make it add itself to existing energy. It kinda does that on its own- you know the whole warmer temperatures here than should be- and since MG have control over it I thought it shouldn’t be impossible.”

“Probably unsurprisingly, you’re not the first to come up with that idea. Some MGs do use that technique: pyromancers like hotter fire, people who punch like bigger impacts, grav-o-mancers- can’t remember the technical term- can make use of more gravity, etcetera, etcetera. The issue is that you can just buy a perk to do the same thing. Likely at a better rate than you could, and with less focus.

“It’s not bad, but when you are stacking passives on passives on passives, the little bit extra that you have to actively control gets forgotten. By all means look into it, it’ll only make you better at manipulating ULE, but don’t worry about mastering it.”

Somewhat confused at how my results appeared so much different from what Rebecca’s lecture would indicate, I ventured, “how much does it help typically? And for that matter, how many power-boosting passives do most MGs have?”

“I think I saw a study that calculated there was at most a twenty-ish percent conversion efficiency- with the exception of heat. To answer your second question, most MGs reach a point where they stop taking tangential perks and focus on getting parallel ones- and those typically also don’t increase energy consumption. So as an MG gets older they are continually getting better at what they decide to focus on. That increased focus and mastery lets them more efficiently get experience. Repeat ad nauseam.”

As I had thought, something was up. Let alone converting all of my momentum into ULE, I was definitely going more than just twenty percent faster- but I held off on sharing that information for now.