“Alright. So- rocks. Throwing rocks. Tis the shit. Tis also the shit Man used to kill animals we couldn’t outfight otherwise. Jolly, aye? Today, we’ll be learning how to throw rocks with magic. What do you know about acceleration?”

“What?”

“It’s how fast something goes from slow to fast, numerically.”

“No, no- I get it. Sorry. Just a surprise. I was a firearms engineer. Wasn’t thinking it’d be in magic. Though thinking about it…”

“Alright. Fun. You know how bullets work. So. Yes. So. I think that I’ll have to explain magic properly, now. Now. So. Halton in the Third Work Order decided that physics was too complicated, so-you-see they came up with a unified nexus theory, or the Grand Unified Plan for physics, and made it simple. Instead of the four fundamental forces you learned- which I know about, we have three. Gravitoelectromagnetism representing gravity and electromagnetism, quantum cohesion replacing the strong force, and temporal flux replacing the weak force. Respectively, they manage gravity and electromagnetism, obviously, then the binding of particles at all scales, then interactions involving time and entropy.”

“That’s something to think about. I didn’t get all that much into… astronomy and particle physics.”

“That’s something to think about for later. I’m talking now. So. For magic, we’re allowed to manipulate the Grand Unified Plan’s Lagrangian representation. It’s a form-first thing, really. Magic is created by writing down the Lagrangian, altering it, and powering the resulting rune or runes depending on what your spell is. You’ve got to connect the runes in order to get them to activate one after the other unless you want to manually go around sticking your wire into each. Each rune-within-rune I’m talking about more or less consists of a lesser sort of Lagrangian that represents a term of the Grand Unified Plan that describes a base element of reality. For, say, throwing a rock, there’s a few ways to go about it. You could use a gravitoelectromagetic propulsion, you could mess with matter fields, you could go the scalar field route, you could warp spacetime curvature, hell, you could use quantum cohesion or gravitoelectromagnetism to trigger a chemical reaction, or quantum cohesion again for some sort of nuclear reaction. We’re going a mostly integrated route with an inert projectile being thrown in a single frame, so we’ll be outlining seven key terms in our Lagrangian of the throwing frame. By single frame, I mean a single moment of powering our rune, since it’ll be designed to provide a single moment of acceleration rather than a guided path, cus that’s advanced shit you can’t do right now with your lack of expertise and, well, level. Alright. To the seven terms for a throwing spell that integrates most of the different ways you could throw a rock. Spacetime geometry minus the gravitoelectromagnetic field plus the scalar field plus the matter field minus the mass term plus temporal flux minus quantum cohesion. I think. The Matter Field is the bullshit I’ve been calling the specification rune, cus it’s singularly more important than all the other runes in the spell. If you’re missing a part, the gods are nice and assume you’re not changing how that bit works, but your magic can’t work at all without a specification rune or the matter field unless you’re trying to universally affect the laws of physics, in which case, good luck in achieving any change without several orders of magnitude more power than humanity’s used in the past millenia. Not happening. Unless you’re secretly a God, of course. That’s cus the Matter Field describes where and what you’re affecting with your spell, obviously. In four dimensions. Though normally you leave out the temporal vector cus if you accidentally make a paradox there’s a correctional factor that will variably fuck you over. For this throwing equation, let’s break it down term by term. Order technically doesn’t matter, since it’s addition and subtraction of the lagrangians rather than anything that needs an order of operations, so let’s just go off the order I made from listing off the top of my head. For spacetime geometry, you alter the cosmological constant term to create gradients. Add this glyph to represent the specified local gravitational field, so you don’t end up trying to change the constants of the whole world. Technically, this shouldn’t work to do anything, but there’s latency in bending the curvature, so you’ll get a little boost even in single-frame magic. In some continuous equations, you’ll need to separately represent the different local gravitational field if it’s not overlapping with the matter field we’ll specify later to find the projectile. For some continuous equations that use spacetime warping dynamically for trajectory adjustments, use this glyph I’m writing outside the rune as a time varying component, which you can later define more clearly in a corner, or with some formula shortcuts. Not our problem right now, since we’re performing single frame magic. Next is the gravitoelectromagnetic field. We’ll just impose a directional force vector through an interaction-term between the projectile’s current and potential force, which I’ll call J and A. Make sure J’s related to our matter field if the field we’re manipulating isn’t in the projectile. It is, here, though, so we don’t need to do anything. Baseline universal assumptions and all that. A’s that directional force vector, encode the direction and magnitude. Latin numbers work, but you’ll need to use the correct glyphs to represent all the other symbols. Now, the scalar field. Just slap in this rune. Can’t be fucked to work with it, cus it’s boring and messy and somehow theoretical, it’s higgs and a bunch of other smaller fields that do weird things. Introduce here a variable for a formula Dionysus recognises, it’s a stabilising scalar potential to cancel out disturbances like drag or uneven curvature around it. Currently it’s not smart enough to not cancel out our own spacetime curving, so I’ll just throw in my custom version. You don’t have permission to use it outside of this lesson, consider it a little maths problem for you to figure out how to recode it. Technically it’s useless in single-frame magic against continuous magic, which scalar field magic is the main use for; counter-magic defences, but its good practice just to include it, since its negligible cost when its negligible effect. Fourth, I think, is the spec rune. Matter fields. It describes matter in quantum fields. It’s tied complicatedly-like to the mass term, but that’s boring maths. It couples to everything it needs to with the code in the scanner. Smart formula I’ve made cus I’m smart. Speaking of, this is where you stick in your scanner- slap the butt end in the greater rune to print the glyphs encoding the quantum field describing basically the constituent particles making up the object. Doesn’t matter much when you do it with this wonderful buddy, so long as it’s not been much longer than an hour or two, the data will be accurate. Think of it less as an actual thing for now and more as a shortcut to that step. Deterministic universe and all that. Don’t ask how it works. Couldn’t explain to a human. Human formulae for predictive formulae for the matter fields’ temporal vectors operate off similar principles but they’re very different. They’re running a universe simulation in my brain and reference the matter field at the temporal value they expect to cast. Back to the runes at hand- sorry, got excited, this term in the matter fields one is useful for continuous magic cus it describes how the matter field moves through spacetime. There’s a mass term minusing off the motion and behaviour ish term I just mention to define interactions with forces, which leads to very complicated things which is why I’m not teaching you continuous magic. Fifth term is the mass term, which is this funny equation, and this rune represents the effective mass term which can arise dynamically from interactions with the scalar field we talked about earlier that I don’t like. Sixth term is temporal flux, which is the third of the fundamental forces. The first part that minuses the second part is the kinetic term for the temporal flux field that manages time and entropy stuff, and the second part is the potential term for the stability and nature of temporal dynamics. Cus that’s how Lagrangians work, you know? Kinetic minus potential. What we’ll be doing is extracting the bracketed value from the potential variable in the temporal lagrangian to adjust the temporal gradient. If we were doing even just a second frame, it’d allow a bit of initial aiming by slowing the projectile over a short time after the single frame, sort of like an early-stage tracer. It’s more useful in continuous magic where you can slow time during acceleration to make more course-corrections and still preserve momentum by gradually restoring time flow as the projectile reaches the target. You take the bracketed value and equal it to spatial entropy and a rate of time flow. There’s not that much temporal stuff can do in single-frame, cus there’s no time element, so I’ll yap more on continuous magic. Using these two glyphs can deal with external disturbances like another fellow fucking with time in the region. That’s through this additional term, where the potential of the temporal lagrangian is set to half of a stabilising constant multiplied by open bracket temporal state minus desired temporal state closed bracket squared. There’s a smarter formula that can turn back time a little and adjust course for perfect trajectory. Don’t recommend it, energy-intensive. Summarily, we aren’t using temporal much cus that’s for timed magic and we’re doing single-frame. Finally, the seventh main term, we’ve got quantum cohesion, because I can’t order my teaching well. The first term describes quantum field level cohesive field interactions, it’s added the interaction term for cohesive forces acting on matter. A potential term is minused that defines how strong the cohesive interaction is, that’s what you alter in the equation. You could modify surface-level cohesive forces to improve aerodynamics… argh, but that’s over time. You’d have to alter that first bit of the interaction term. It basically makes air do the friction thingy less. Next part might be a war crime, I can’t remember. You dynamically alter the second part of the interaction term, the gauge field to reshape the projectile mid-flight. So long as you don’t expand the projectile inside an enemy, it’s not like hollow point bullets, so just be careful. Finally, you could alter the quantum field level cohesive field interactions to create a delayed cohesive collapse. As in, definitely a war crime. You’ll make the projectile fragmentate upon impact, turning a single hole into a grate at low energies and turning a penetrated person into a fog of blood at high energies. Again, definitely a war crime. But if you’re not fighting people, go ham. Personally, if you introduce an earlier “projectile” which could be done via a space-time curvature, you could control the splitting point of the projectile and get a sort of combined sniper-fire buckshot effect. Takes both pros from anti-material rifles and sawed-off shotguns. It’d also be hard to trace, since the bullet would break apart at the subatomic level. And, and, and, there’s less threat of ricochet off hard surfaces and thus risk to friendly forces and civilians, if you somehow have to use this in a closed space. And done.”

She stands up, eyes glowing with a sort of lust for the art, runes and glyphs scrawled over the sand. I take a moment to photographically memorise the sight. She grins chaotically.

“Now, isn’t that absolutely fucking cool?”

“Fuck, yeah,” I say, monotonously, trying to digest the sermon.

She chuckles quietly to herself, once, then twice, after a short pause, watching her handiwork, before going over and kicking up the sand.

“Hope you understood.” She scoops up a handful of sand from the floor, clenching it, and turning it into beryl. She presses the new form, turned into a 20x110mm Hispano cartridge, into my hand, along with the scanner. “Shoot this. Just like I explained to you a moment before in painstaking detail. Remember. You can use latin numerals if you haven’t figured out the numerical system for the glyphs. I will skin you if you don’t get it in half an hour. Single frame. Don’t do anything too ambitious.”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Do I use my finger, to like, trace in the sand?”

“Sure, if you want to trace before your pour the mana in.”

I close my eyes and the image slowly appears before my eyes. I dissect it. Right. First important part. Matter fields. I place the Beryl in the sand at my feet, and scan it.

“Ambitious.”

“Do I stop? You said it’d work for up to an hour after. I suppose that meant the limiting factor was an hour or two rather than accidentally jittering the rock around.”

“That’s not just a rock, I made it- nevermind. Yeah, yeah, cocky bastard. I’ll talk again when you’re done.”

Right. Matter field. I press the scanner’s printing end into the sand, serving as a base for the rest of the Mandala. Then the forces and fields. Four- no, three, three fundamental forces. Gravitoelectromagnetism. Main propulsive force in a single frame mandala. First the field strength tensor as the negative value, the potential energy in that Lagrangian. Then the positive interaction. How was that vector represented again? Right. Now for a value. I can’t remember my roman numerals. They’d had like… X, C, I, V? I just toss a few together. Next. Quantum cohesion. Am I supposed to touch that, again? Oh yeah. Just upp the cohesive interaction potential. Bracket it, and use what I assume’s the addition glyph to plug in a random roman value.

“Good work.” Beryl’s voice distracts me.

“What’s happened to shutting up?”

“I never said that. I do as I please.”

“I speak as I-” No, no you don’t, Iphigenia. You don’t want to get flayed by the machine lady. Shut up.

She snorts, amused. I get back to focusing. Temporal flux. Uh. Ignore that, I guess. She did say leaving blanks would lead to base assumptions. It’s only single-frame magic, she did say Temporal’s basically useless in that situation, right? I think I’m actually really bad at directly memorising stuff. I can only remember my summaries, and I can’t trust my voice in my memory. It’s already proven unreliable. No time for that, though. Now the weird fields. Scalar field? Just that weird personal rune she said was hers. It’s the simplest glyph in the mandala by far. Now that’s four out of seven. Good progress. No. Wait. Five? Yeah, five. Uh. What’s left?

I stare dumbfounded, for a moment, wracking my memory.

“If you can’t remember, just say the word. I’m getting bored.”

“What word?”

“Yes? The word’s yes. It’s yes to my question if you can’t remember.”

“No.”

“Suit yourself. I hear fast deaths are better than slow ones.”

“Flaying is not fast.”

“You’re not, either. Hurry up.”

OH OH OH. Geometry. Spacetime geometry. Right. Just change the cosmological constant term to create a gradient with the rest of everything, and toss in a scalar from the matter field stuff to couple. That’s six. Last one… mass term. Ah, yeah. Higgs. Uh. Nah. Not fucking with that.

“Done.”

“Doesn’t look done to me.”

“Shit. Meant done with the trace. How do I get the mana?”

“Say mana. Subvocal works as well, as you should know.”

“Mana.” I choke, after, and vomit into the air a golden liquid.

“That’s new. Never seen it come out of the mouth.”

It’s choking me. I pull it out, the material seemingly between a ribbon and liquid, floating on the air. I gasp, after.

“How the fuck-”

“Idiot. You control it with your mind. Fill in the traced mandala.”

It looks like liquid gold pouring into a sheathe. Extremely thin.

A notification flashes. Mana down to zero. I check on other stats.

HP’s down to 33/50, probably from the choking.

SP’s down to 50/100. Stress? Choking? Trying to listen to a sermon a few minutes out of birth? I just feel a bit worse, I guess. I’m used to lectures, though, so I’m probably doing better with the sermons than another in my place would. It’s morbidly funny to think that.

“Won’t it leak?”

“It’s not liquid. It’s mana. You control it with your mind. Will it to harden, and it’ll stop, though. Harden it. You’re done filling.”

I do. “Question,” I say, after a moment. “Does the thickness matter?”

“Only so much as how much you can save and still keep the form intact. Mathematically speaking, a single atom thick should be the thinnest possible, but that would probably take practice.”

“Good?”

“Good.”

We stare quietly at the inscribed Mandala, glowing with reflected horizonlight. Beryl breaks the silence.

“Right. You remember what I said about the back of your head?”

“You’re treating me like a child.”

“You are a child.”

“That’s new. Age hasn’t much to do with intellect when there’s smart people like me and intellectually challenged people of drinking age. You’re treating me like a retarded child.”

“Wrong, for one. For another, you’re Fugued.”

“Fuck does that tell me?”

“I hit you with a fourth year course on particle physics five minutes after you were born. I’m being patient.”

“Great.”

I think, and raise my hand. A wire snaps into it from the tube. A chill runs down my spine. I walk around the mandala, going to the sole empty slot, from a two dimensional perspective.

“How do I scale the power I need?”

“Work done is current by time. Voltage is current times resistance. The wire’s got weird resistance properties- you’ll be fine- oh, oh. I mean, the wire’s smart. It figures it out. Basically, it’ll fill until it can’t. That’s the way Mana works. Just plug it in.”

“Alright.” I look to where the Beryl rests in the sand.

A sonic boom. A crack that could split the world apart. It certainly splits my brain. The sand flies up in my eyes, and I fall backwards. A blast outline in the sand trails vaguely towards my northeast. The Beryl is gone.

“You know, if you’d fucked up your direction, you’d be pink mist.”

“I didn’t.” I look to where the mandala was. Only the outline is vaguely left, though the mussed up sand has muddied it.

A ping. My joules bar flashes. It’s gone down from 4.184x10e+9 to 4.174x10e+9. I’ve used about a gallon of gasoline’s worth of energy in an instant.

“Lazy,” Beryl says, finally, a quiet undertone in her voice. “You skipped a couple of terms. Don’t blame you, though, that’s good magecraft. That saves energy.”

“Weird tone for being proud of me.”

Beryl’s voice is cold. “I’m not. You plugged in numbers without a care to bend the laws of reality to shoot a rock at fifty thousand kilometres a second. You’re wasting a fuckload of watts. Joules. Equivalent over single-frame, whatever. Shit’s precious. Don’t waste what you don’t have to, principle of scarcity, because that shit is scarce, especially for you, with your tube. I’ve got my own tube, but yours is the starter one. Government one. Military-grade, meaning it’s as cheaply produced as possible. Halton’s allowance isn’t much, and you’ll need it later. Right. If you want to emulate the power of a gun, most guns don’t shoot faster than four hundred metres a second. That clocked in at least fifty kilometres a second, and you probably just emptied your watt storage with sending that fucker over a hundred times the speed of a rifle. If you can’t control yourself, just get a gun.”

“But I’ve only used around 2% of my joules.”

“You’ve used a fiftieth of your monthly energy allowance on a demonstration rock to send at into the sky at ten thousand metres a second. Are you batshit stupid? Don’t shoot rocks. Blah.”

“Then what’s ballistic magic even for?”

“Projectile magic. It’s for telekinesis. There are more uses than bullets. Like heavy-lifting. Like drone control. Like travel. Like missile disabling. Magic can literally do anything if you’re smart enough, not just throw shit like an ape and break your own bones.”

“Alright, alright, fair, fair.” I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Best not to argue with the god-lady.

She pinches the bridge of her nose, and waits a few seconds. “Sorry about the outburst. It’s really not a matter of life or death for you. It’s just… yeah, I’m a little tight about things like this. It’d seem pretentious to say trauma, so I’ll say trauma.”

“K.”

“Lemme show off a bit, needa blow off steam.” She picks up a handful of sand, and it condenses into a rock. It hovers, flying around, and Beryl gestures off into the air, the rock speeding out, evaporating into a smoke trail as it traces a geometrical square.

“How did you do that?”

“I’m a robot. Internal mechanisms. And I’ve got scanners in my eyes. The physical gestures were unnecessary. Just cool.”

“Dang. Could I do that?”

“No. My brain is the size of a small city, that’s where the magic happens, and your brain’s at best a fourth the size of a watermelon. That’s the neat thing. So long as you have accurate data, you could make magic happen from as far away as you want. This body’s a puppet connected to the brain by an internal portal. Sadly, world doesn’t have developed electronics, cus the laws of physics got changed by Halton and messed up how electrons work, and Halton’s had developed biotech for a long time, so there’s been no research and consequently no tech in electronics. Biological components like cultured brains don’t work with runes unless they’re mage brains, and that’s got ethical problems, so my brain’s an analogue mechanical computer running in accelerated time and in superposition. A good enough substitute.”

“So you’re like a quantum supercomputer abacus?”

“Are you- never-mind. Not quite. Pretty much. Let’s get to chronomancy. My least favourite mess.”