November 2, 2022
Day 13
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"You don't have to burn the forest, Maya. No one here will ever force you to fight a certain way. Honestly, you don't have to fight at all if you don't want to. But I believe it'll be worth it to grind your way to level 25. At that point, you will unlock specializations of the mage class, and you can pick the healer class if you decide that elemental magic isn't your thing."
Rahul finished speaking, and Maya shook her head.
"No, that's not what I meant to say. I am willing to fight. I have to fight. The past two weeks were already insane, but today's events have made it abundantly clear that dangerous situations are inevitable in our new world. I have to be able to defend myself. But not like this. Getting burnt and drowning are both very painful and horrible ways to go. I will find a better way to fight, a better way to protect myself, and to kill if I have to. But I will kill without pain. It's a small distinction, but I fear it's the only one that I can afford in such a brutal world."
Then after a pause, she quietly added.
"I already delayed us today, I won't be a burden again."
All three boys shook their heads as Rahul replied.
"You're not a burden Maya. Please banish that thought. We are a team and each one of us is different. Honestly, the three of us would benefit from having even a bit of that empathy you feel for all living beings. We've all been killing crocodiles without sparing a thought for the morality of it. The frogs had attacked us, but we have come into the habitat of these reptiles and taken it over. We know it's a dungeon, but does that really make the crocodiles any less alive."
Rahul had strong suspicions about where these crocodiles came from and recalled the very first System Message, particularly the part mentioning the cost of failure to align with a bastion. But he decided not to voice those thoughts.
"I'm honestly just treating this dungeon as a leveling opportunity. We all are. As if it's a game. Or maybe it's the fact that it's either kill or be killed here that has numbed us to the suffering we are causing. Truth is, this is unchartered territory, no one knows what to do, what's right or wrong, and what's acceptable. Your hesitation is not something we have to tolerate. It's healthy, it's necessary and it's welcome."
Rahul knew he was lying. Not because he didn't mean what he said. He meant every word. But he was lying by omission. Even though Rahul understood it, Maya's reluctance to fight irritated him. Rahul was impatient.
But he was also Maya's friend. So he would value her perspective and appreciate the good her presence brought to the team, even if she herself couldn't. That's what he will focus on. Not his irritation. He continued speaking.
"You see more than we do. You see more than levels, more than stats. You see living beings and you care. While most of us buried the memory of what happened earlier today, you didn't. You cried for our friends. You even flinched at the screams of crocodiles who wouldn't think twice before biting our heads off. You shook as every crocodile died. You are different, and while it may make you less effective at mindless killing, yours is a perspective our group lacks and we need you here. We need you with us to be a voice of reason if we ever go too far."
Rahul knew he was putting the horse before the cart by saying all these things when Maya appeared quite content to continue killing crocodiles, just less painfully. But something told him that Maya needed the reassurance. Even if he was wrong, it didn't hurt to let his friends know they were valued.
Maya spoke with a smile.
"Thanks, Rahul. I needed to hear that. Your words mean a lot."
Then she looked at Charlie
"Charlie, could you deal with the remaining crocodiles on my side too? There's something I want to try."
Charlie smiled and replied.
"That's not a problem at all."
Then he got to work, and within a minute, their flanks were clear of crocodiles.
Matt spoke next.
"That felt too easy. The crocodiles rarely stray from their floats without being provoked. A rush of all nearby crocodiles attacking us at once is a significant event. But it wasn't even a challenge for Charlie alone."
Rahul shrugged.
"I think we attracted most of the nearby crocodiles into our big showdown earlier. There probably weren't that many left for this attack."
Charlie nodded, as Maya spoke.
"I'll walk a little behind you guys, I have some ideas on how to improve the fireball attack and would need some space to practice."
Seeing as how the area around the group was cleared of crocodiles for miles, no one objected. And so the group resumed their march, Maya walking 100 feet behind the others, throwing around fireballs in every direction.
A few minutes passed, and just as they were about to reach the island, the boys turned back to look at what Maya had been up to. They watched for a bit and realized that no two fireballs that left her palms were the same. Some were large, some were small. Some went a mile before they exploded, while others exploded after traversing just 200 feet.
That in itself wasn't surprising. Every one of them had learned the fireball spell either during or after the frog attack. And as part of their daily practice sessions, Anand had taught them to control how much mana they channeled into the spell. It didn't take a genius to realize that more mana meant bigger fireballs.
Controlling the distance the fireball traveled before it exploded, now that was a different story altogether. A feat only a few could manage. But everyone knew Maya could do it. Rahul had talked to Maya about it and she had told him that it involved altering the way the mana particles were packed.
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"Some packing structures are very stable, while others fall apart in seconds" Maya had said. She had asked Rahul to see the structures in terms of Bravais lattices, hoping it'd clear things up. Despite her good intentions, the result had been the opposite, and Rahul had given up. He was going to be a rogue anyway.
Honestly, Maya was a mana control savant, she and Anand both were. Almost everyone else had accepted that and given up just like Rahul, deciding to put their effort to master the basics first. In the end, apart from these two, only Daniel managed to exercise fine control over the fireballs. His control was actually even more flexible than Maya and Anand's. But that had little to do with mana mastery and more to do with his ingenious technique.
He used the power of intent on the fireballs! With intent, Daniel could nudge the fireballs to do his bidding, and that allowed for a whole array of possibilities.
Unfortunately, Daniel was new to this and his ability to affect reality with intent was very limited. He could induce only subtle changes, noticeable only if you measure the fireball's distance with a tape, while Maya could make a fireball go twice as far as anyone else. Daniel's intent-based manipulation was a novelty, while Maya's mana mastery had real use in battle.
As these thoughts played in Rahul's head and he watched Maya's adept control over the fireballs, he noticed something else.
The explosions. They were different every time.
Some of the fireballs were exploding in a big diffuse blast, while other explosions involved a much smaller radius and concentrated explosion.
That was very surprising.
Rahul looked at Matt and Charlie and the shock written on their faces made it clear they too had noticed.
Maya had been trying to control the explosion intensity for days without any progress. Many others too, the to-be mages in particular, had tried and failed. Daniel was the only one who could somewhat do it, but the effect was predictably weak and most dismissed the use of intent as cheating.
But now Maya could do it. And it wasn't a fluke either, she was consistently adjusting and changing the explosion radius.
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A few minutes later, Maya was done with her practice and was walking back toward the group. Rahul couldn't wait any longer and shouted in her direction.
"How are you doing that? Changing the size of the explosion."
Maya walked a bit faster, but much to Rahul's disappointment, she waited till she was closer before she began speaking.
"I have been working on this for the past few days. I had tried many approaches but hit a wall every time. Please don't tell anyone, but I had even talked to Daniel and taken some lessons on intent-based fireball control. I had hoped to get some fresh insights that way, but that too was a dead-end. But when I tried it now, it was like magic theory itself had become clearer to me. I had a breakthrough in minutes. I think increasing my intelligence and getting the mage class provided me with some kind of a cognitive boost in matters of magic. "
Then after a pause, she weakly added.
"The urgency of the situation helped too, I think. "
Rahul could understand that. The intelligence stat and the mage class had to be big factors. He didn't discount the role of urgency, as Maya put it, either. Many breakthroughs happen in the heat of battle. Even in the pre-integration earth, a lot of scientific discoveries happened during the two World Wars. The cold war and the space race likely led to a century's worth of progress in space exploration in a matter of decades.
With that pace of scientific development, no wonder some people believe that the moon landing was fake.
Maya cleared her throat and continued.
"Before I get to the explanation of how I'm able to do this, I need to set some background first. Firstly, the amount of mana decides the size and total damage output. Secondly, the stability of the fireball structure controls the detonation time and distance. But there's a third effect that I noticed last week, a slight variation in the explosion radius based on the stability of the lattice. The effect wasn't enough to matter, and the tight coupling with the detonation distance made it useless. I wanted to be able to control the explosion distance and radius independently. That's why I had dismissed that line of thought."
Maya took a pause, thinking of the best way to explain herself, then continued.
"But today, as I hurled fireballs left and right, I walked and thought. And my brain made a connection that it never could have before the level-up. As I held a fireball in my hand and felt every mana particle, I had an epiphany. I immediately understood why the explosion radius varied with changes in the lattice structure. It was the slightly varied motions and vibrations of the mana particles assembled in different lattices that decided how strong, and therefore how large the explosion was. So what would happen if I intentionally varied those vibrations independent of the lattice structure? "
Rahul interrupted her.
"You can do that? Control the vibrations of individual mana particles? Are they even particles? "
Then Rahul had a thought and added.
"To be fair, I never understood how you could arrange them into a lattice structure in the first place. Please go on. "
Maya grinned.
"Yes, I can control both the vibrations and the structure. And no, mana particle is probably not a scientifically accurate way to describe what constitutes mana, at least not based on how science currently defines particles. Honestly, our current scientific theories are insufficient to explain much of what has happened since the integration. "
Her audience nodded and Maya continued.
"That's not to say all the physics we learned is useless. If you see mana as composed of mana particles, and the fireball as a mass of those particles in the gaseous state, you get a very helpful model that lets you apply the ideal gas law and principles of thermodynamics. And the laws work! The details are still vague since I've barely had any time to theorize it all, but I can go over the broad strokes!"
This time it was Matt who spoke.
"I can't believe it. Physics in magic theory. This new world is terrible. "
Maya giggled and took Matt's feigned outrage as permission to explain.
"So, in any given fireball, there is a fixed amount of energy. Some of that is kinetic energy, and that lies in the motion of the mana particles. The rest is kinetic energy that lies dormant, not just within the mana particle itself, but also in the lattice structure that binds the particles together. Fast vibrating particles have high kinetic energy. Slowly vibrating ones on the other hand have low kinetic energy but high potential energy. "
Rahul completed her statement.
"So when the fireball explodes, that potential energy is what powers the explosion!"
Maya nodded.
"Yes. But let's take a step back. As you would know, the kinetic energy of the particles determines the temperature of any substance. A fireball with high kinetic energy will burn incredibly hot but will result in a smaller explosion. Less of the energy will be turned into shockwaves and sound, and most will stay as heat, meaning a small but wickedly hot explosion. If the kinetic energy is low, the explosion would be big, and the shockwave from the fireball would be devastating, far eclipsing the damage that the burns cause. Of course, fire mana will always be hot. You can't slow down the vibration of the mana particles to such an extent that the fire is gone and all that's left is a stun grenade. "
Rahul nodded. He remembered enough physics to understand what Maya was talking about. But understanding a concept and coming up with it are not the same. Knowing the kinetic theory of gases from high school thermodynamics was one thing. Having the insight to apply it to mana, to magic. That was something else entirely.
Rahul saw the looks of admiration on the faces of Charlie and Matt and knew they shared the sentiment. Rahul spoke.
"I can't believe you figured all that out in the last few minutes. You're amazing!".
Charlie chimed in.
"Not just the theory. You seem to be already adept at altering the vibrations of mana particles. Something you didn't even know was possible fifteen minutes ago. I wouldn't even know where to start. "
Matt nodded in agreement.
"I would never believe it if it all hadn't happened right in front of me. Or behind me, since we are all being technical here. "
He laughed at the last part.
Maya just repeated her earlier explanation.
"It was the stats I allotted to intelligence and the mage class. "
Rahul smiled at her humility and then asked the question that had been bugging him.
"So what is it that you're planning to do now that you can cause smaller but more concentrated and hotter explosions? "
Maya hesitated a bit before she spoke.
"Smaller explosions are nice, but I want to take it further. I need fireballs that are as small as a pebble and as fast as an arrow. And if at all possible, I would like to get rid of the part where the fireballs explode altogether"
Rahul processed that for a moment. It took a few seconds before he understood what Maya was saying. He opened his mouth to speak, but Charlie beat him to it.
"You are trying to make fire mana bullets!"