Chapter 4: Guilhem Desq - Wizard

Huh. Easier to do than I thought, but harder to actually do it well. I had a swirling ball of mana in my hands, or more accurately, a ball without mana. I could tug the strange substance in any direction I wanted, but it was hard to thin it out and force it to leave. It needed to be everywhere. Creating a bubble of space without it was damn tiring. It felt like holding back the entire ocean of mana that surrounded me. It drained me in a way that I couldn't put a finger on. So, creating a small bubble to hold a regular everyday battery in was definitely impressive in its own right. Except…

It wasn't enough. That boggled the mind – how the hell was something like the Elemental able to exist, but something as simple as this was so hard to achieve? I just wanted to isolate the car battery long enough to drive home. It would work – I knew it would, this little C battery not electrocuting my hand and burning itself out proved as much – but to do that, I would need to figure out how to keep a bubble the size of the truck going, while moving, while driving it. If the sweat starting to bead on my brow was any indication, I needed to keep way more concentration on the bubble than the road.

The System didn't have anything else to say to me for the rest of the morning, even though I had a few choice words to give to it. And no amount of wishful thinking brought up a skills menu or statistics sheet like when I'd [Inspected] the Elemental. Being as user-friendly as it was, I couldn't imagine it would be restricted to voice commands for something ‘simple' like that. Not when [Inspect] came as unbidden and naturally as it did. I was probably just doing something wrong, because of course I was. We were charting new territory here.

My concentration slipped, and I felt the world start to cave in on my bubble. I tried to throw the battery away, before—

The mana slammed together without sound, but turned a brilliant hue before soaking into the freshly minted bomb in my hand. The battery vibrated ominously, already chucked several dozen paces away by my prodigious throw, well cultivated from a few years of Little League.

It popped in the air like a firecracker, the shrapnel chased by miniature lightning bolts ionizing the air behind them. I stared at the pile of burnt grass numbly, then looked down at my blessedly-not-eviscerated fingers.

That was way more energy than a plain-Jane Duracell should have, right? Scary. What exactly was the Imperium doing with mana if it was capable of something like that? Why use the System to grab the Earth if they could just up and chuck lightning bolts at their problems? Thoughts for a smarter, not-as-accident-prone person. But I knew the answer would be scary.

I was beginning to sigh a lot lately. Wonder why. I decided to crack open a can of beer and a bag of chips for food. Eating well was no longer that high up on the list of priorities. I’d been planning to save the junk for the end of the weekend as a treat, but I'd call not getting killed by a flying boulder worthy of a special treat. And I was really feeling the beer. The perishables I had brought with me for the weekend would keep for a while longer, some sandwich meat still kept cold in a decent ice chest, unless there was some fuckery to be had with mana and germs… Void that thought. Erase it now and never consider something that scary ever again. Ahem. BUT, I had some non-perishable cans that would go for a while longer. Good, old fashioned Vienna Sausages and SPAM, here to save the year. I learned well from my first set of unfortunate experiences out here. For some reason I’d thought back then I had bought enough food to last the month. I was technically correct. I could stay here for a while longer, maybe. The question was how long it would be until something else found me.

I might not be hungry for a while, but something else certainly will be. I wasn’t under the illusion that a non-organic earth elemental was the only kind of monster out here. Nevermind why it came from the east in the general direction of Denver, or how it got here as quickly as it did, the point was that it did, so other things would too. I had a feeling that would be a perfectly valid excuse for a lot of things for a while.

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I was seriously starting to weigh the opportunity costs here. I could stay in this gorgeous comfort zone of nature and peace, steadily learning how to control mana, OR, I could gather what I could carry, start walking and hope for the best.

One brings the risk of being brutally murdered by fantasy creatures in a steel-covered mini fortress, the other, the risk of being brutally murdered by fantasy creatures in the open air. Tough call.

Near the end of the day, I’d managed to push the boundaries of my little bubble to the size of my whole body. It was rough going. I was starting to feel the physical pushback when the bubble inevitably collapsed. I’d be worried about smashing organs if the reaction was big enough, but all it felt like was a strangely invigorating buildup of pressure before it vanished.

There was no instruction manual for this kind of thing. Was it as easy as good sensation = good thing, or was this pretty much the same as playing with a screwdriver that held up a barrier to some Plutonium and I’d die here in a week? Not a clue. But barring any words of timely and helpful advice from the almighty System, I had to experiment a bit. I didn't think I was totally on the right track – if the sensation of pressure was what I was after, I should've been trying to press the mana inside me instead of trying to shove it away. I forget if I’d felt this while the ocean of mana was washing over me, but it didn't register at all to me at the time. I was more focused on how I was still alive than feeling out what amounted to the same pressure a cat laying on my belly might have. Small and only slightly hostile.

The sun was past the range, nearly down again, and I got to see the red-blue sky melt into the deep green of the forest. I’d never get tired of it. But I was getting tired of maintaining the boundary that’s grown to the size of the truck cabin. Just a little more and I could start focusing on duration. It would take me two hours to get back to my small apartment. If I took breaks, disconnecting the battery in between? I’d be golden. Or in Golden, at least. I couldn't imagine what I’d do after that, but I didn’t think any plans I made now would survive up until then. I had my gun at home. That felt like a decent start. Actually, would a gun be any better than a mini battery bomb? Food for thought; I had a few of them left.

My hold slipped again, and the wave crashed down just like before. At first, I could only hold out for a minute or so, but with just a bit of practice that last one streched on for just about 10 minutes. The air outside my body twisted with blue light for a moment, then melded with the rest of the ocean, at peace once more.

Inside my body though, a war broke out.

The torrent of mana shredded my insides. Just as unpleasant as it sounds, I buckled over in pain, losing my pensive stance I’d been holding in the bed of the pickup. I couldn’t tell you what had been different, the last bubble had only been the tiniest bit larger than the last. My panic reached for the skies as I was certain I just brushed against death's veil. It hurt. Way too much. I couldn't deal with pain well. My thoughts got shaky; my body stopped listening. It was just as bad as back then. No, maybe this was worse?

What could I do? I could feel it now, more than before. Earlier moving mana felt so natural, like walking through rain. Now it constantly resisted me like wading through a patch of freshly poured Quick Cement in Arizona. That pressure I’d felt earlier erupted. It wasn't a cat, it was a damned tiger, and I’d just pulled its tail.

I focused my mind down to a point. I couldn't move, but that was fine. This wasn't a problem of the body, not really. It just felt like my insides were on fire. The damned mana wanted to go out of control? Fine. I'll just have to tame you.

Stay down.

The mana that radiated out from my center froze in place. I pressed down on it with everything I had, repositioning it, packing it in, shifting it until it became just like that shining beacon of a marble I’d created the last night. Then I went further. Deeper. The mana wasn’t like a liquid, or like smoke, or anything physical after all. It could compress itself as much as it wanted. As much as I wanted. And I wanted it to grind itself down to nothing. So it became nothing. Then it became everything.

I passed out to the sound of a far-too-pleasant *ding*.