The moment the sun came up Alice was shaken awake by one of the friends she had made last night. There was barely enough light to see by and Alice had a minor stomach ache from the early rise. If Alice wasn’t missing the rest site she called home before, she definitely was now. She was led to an area outside the village along with all of the children she had seen yesterday by two adult goblins while Karandi followed behind them. All the children were given a choice between learning magic from one of the instructors or learning how to fight from another with the majority of them choosing combat. It seemed combat training would be a series of sparring matches with the instructor commenting on them while magic training was the first step of linking the mind and soul. Alice was leaning towards going to the combat group but was taken by the goblin chief before she could make her choice.
“Why can’t I practice with the others?”
“Because of your suicidal goals the training the others are doing won’t have you ready to leave for another year or two, but I’m sure you want to be gone much earlier than that. But at your current level all you could do against the weakest monster is die, your attacks are too weak to even annoy them and without hundreds of points to endurance or some high quality armor your guaranteed to die at the first strike. With all that said, there’s nothing to be done about that at such short notice. So instead of training you up into a well rounded warrior, your only option is a ridiculous amount of hyper specialisation into magic and evasion. You following so far?”
While Alice was thankful for the lessons, she didn’t appreciate that the entire arrangement had been forced on her. Her mentor also seemed unnecessarily rushed. Regardless Alice gave a short nod to get him to continue.
“I’ll have to ask a few questions before we start in earnest but I’m assuming you at least know how to cast spells right? First: What is mana?”
Alice tried to remember her first magic lessons with her mom outside her house, before coming up with an answer she wasn’t confident in the accuracy of.
“Mana is everything?”
“That’s only part of the answer, mana is everything that can and cannot exist all at once. In a way it’s like you, trying to be everything it ends up being nothing. So when mana is transformed into a spell, your are just choosing the characteristics you want the mana to have. The next thing would be to have you cast your strongest spell.”
Alice did as she was asked to get it over with as soon as she could. Alice started by channeling her mana out in front of her before settling on using a fire spell as she had done the most research on fire spells. The basic components of fire were oxygen fuel and heat, if all went well alice would only have to supply the heat at the beginning to light the fire as opposed to throughout like in a normal flame spell and the oxygen was a given due to the air. The next part would be fuel, and while alice could use something like wood to catch the flame, she had a different idea, one that could work fantastically or literally blow up in her face. The entire plot only made possible by her time studying the textbook.
Stolen story; please report.
Alice split her mana into three different sections and gave them different effects the biggest and costliest section was a net of air mana that would act as a filter for the air that only let through hydrogen and oxygen, Alice had to compromise a bit and allow water through as well but once she got the filter working she no longer needed to use any mana on it, instead she was mentally taxed as she had to concentrate on keeping the structure together. The next part of the spell was a simple wind spell to blow air through the filter, this would probably be the only constant mana drain of the spell, as well as a considerable mental drain. The next step would be the final and most important. Alice created a small ball of mana, about the size of a marble and imposed heat onto its very being, she removed every aspect of the mana other than heat and pushed the full weight of her mind into it. The concentration to hold the other two parts of the spell while also getting the marble of mana to a hot enough temperature was enough to give Alice a fever, which she immediately used as a reference to push more heat in, until, at last, Alice had a mini flamethrower in her hands. In the dim morning light it looked quite magnificent, like a small dragon was breathing pale blue flames from her hands. Chanting the spell would have helped by reducing her mental burden but would also mean finding a suitable chant to describe the entire spell configuration which would ironically make the spell harder to hold onto.
Alice increased the airflow of the wind spell to get the flames to go further, and went over the limit of her concentration. The wind spell imploded into itself and brought air rushing in from all directions, including through the filter. The filter didn’t allow fire through it, but the collapse of one section broke her concentration throughout and the filter came crashing down and let the entire cloud of flammable gas ignite. A small explosion ripped through the air in front of her, though incredibly loud the cloud wasn’t big enough to do much damage. Other than the emotional damage caused by Alice’s embarrassment, she had let out a quite scared scream and fallen onto her backside at the collapse of her dragon’s breath. This made Alice happy she hadn’t gone with the original plan of shooting the flames from her mouth.
Congratulations! Skill [Fire Magic Proficiency Lvl 4] has split from [All Magic Proficiency Lvl 2]!
“Took way too long to prepare and a spell that has that much mental drain can’t easily be used in combat, but if you can fix those issues while keeping that much firepower then it’ll definitely worth it. All you’ll have to do is get it activated quicker and get an attack like that for every main attribute and we’ll be halfway done.” The goblin offered a hand to her to help her up.