Jeremy held the paper up for Hazel to see again and tapped on the aether rune. “If I were to replace this with the rune for mana, would it work the same way, just for mana?”
“I would assume so,” Hazel said, eyebrows lifting at Jeremy’s excitement.
“This is the spell I was thinking would be so useful for everyone!” He told them. “Something to allow other people to see something like what I see.”
Zanie smiled and held out her hand for the paper. “At least in terms of mana concentration. It wouldn’t let people see runes, but it would let them know the levels of their enemies or themselves, which is useful.”
“I bet I could figure out a way to modify it so that it did show runes eventually, but I’m not sure how I could do that exactly.” He frowned and looked at Hazel, who just shrugged.
He looked perfectly composed despite the heat rippling off the highway around them. When they were moving, it was hot because they were moving. But now that they were stopped it was almost worse because the humidity seemed to envelop them and the asphalt cook them.
Yet, despite the sheen of sweat on Hazel’s forehead, not a hair was out of place, nor did he look flushed from the heat. Jeremy winced when a bead of sweat dripped down his own forehead and got into the corner of his eye. He ran a hand through his wet hair and refreshed his mental reminder that he needed to get it cut. How Hazel, Caleb, and Zanie could all deal with long hair was beyond him.
“You would need to be able to refine what this…” Hazel reached over to point to the scanning rune.
“Radar rune,” Zanie provided, nodding her head in approval of her own name. “It had alliteration.”
“Okay,” Hazel went with it, “The radar rune, or the illusion rune…more likely the illusion rune now that I am thinking about it would need to be refined so that it’s not just showing you the coarse concentration of mana, but the other information that Jeremy can see. They type of mana or the forms that it is taking, if you will.”
Zanie pointed to the illusion rune. “So is this all one rune, because it looks kind of complex, although I suppose creating an illusion would be.”
“Well, one part of it is the rune for one of the main magic types, isn’t it?” Jeremy looked at Hazel again for confirmation.
If it was one of the main magic types from the book, that meant there would be a whole section of different spells that he could sort through to figure out how to tweak the illusion to show exactly what he wanted. And now that Hazel was traveling with them, he would not have to worry about trying each spell out to figure out what it did.
“It is,” he agreed. “Essentially, it is illusion magic—one of the more difficult schools, I’m afraid. The smaller rune beside it, in this case, dictates what type of illusion you see. You’re…infrared.”
“Aren’t you constantly running an Illusion magic spell so you can speak to us?” Zanie asked.
“Yes,” Hazel smiled at her. “Like with anything, if you have enough experience with magic in general, you can normally cast very basic spells. I could not cast any of the more complex illusionary spells that a few of my comrades could. But at my level, this is no trouble. You all were able to cast the life sense spell, weren’t you?”
“Not without exhausting ourselves,” Jeremy said.
“I imagine if this were the first spell you ever tried to cast, it would fail. But otherwise, it is fairly beginner-level.” Hazel said.
“Hey!” Caleb shouted from far ahead of them. He had finally realized that they were not following behind him, but it had taken a while. With his hands cupped around his mouth, he yelled, “What the hell are you doing?”
“Let’s catch up to him really quick,” Jeremy said. “And then, Zanie, you should try to cast the spell and see if it works.”
They jogged up to Caleb, who waited with his hands on his hips, his face expression of disbelief. “If you are going to take a break, you could at least let me know.”
Atticus trotted over from his feet toward Hazel and rubbed against his ankles until he bent and scooped her into his arms. She lay in the crook of his elbow and began purring. Jeremy had been so wrapped up in the fact that Hazel was an elf who knew about magic that he had not really stopped yet to ponder the fact that the two of them had shown up together.
But now was not the time to ponder that.
“I think I figured out a way for other people to see mana like I do,” Jeremy told Caleb. Zanie is going to try it.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
He stepped back and gestured for Zanie to go ahead.
“What’s the rune for mana?” She asked.
“Oh, right.” He reached into his pocket for his pen and scribbled it onto the page above the aether rune. Then everyone stepped back, and she faced them with the paper held in front of her. She grinned at them.
“Here we go.” She cast the spell. Around her floated the mana, radar, and illusionary runes, all in a shimmering little dance. There was, of course, no actual effect of the spell, because it was simply creating an illusion for her to see. So they waited with bated breath for her to tell them what had happened.
“I think it works!” she announced, letting her hands drop to her sides and looking between them with wide eyes. “Jeremy what color are everyone’s overlays to you?”
“So, you can actually see them?” he blurted. “All our ours are red, and Hazel’s is blue.”
“I don’t think that I’m seeing exactly what you do,” she tilted her head, then dropped her chin and looked down at herself. “We look kind of…green? And Hazel looks red. But I can see the rings, actually, which is weird.”
“If the life sense spell shows something similar to an infrared output, then this is probably doing the same thing.” Jeremy mused. “So it’s not really what I see, but it’s essentially the same thing. Especially if you can see the rings.”
“Yeah.” Zanie nodded slowly and looked between them again. “Hazel has like five rings, wow.”
“It was a requirement to come on the recon trip.” Hazel waved a hand dismissively. “I barely qualified, but I am near to the next stage in my development, I believe. There have been many opportunities to fight monsters here.”
Jeremy opened his mouth to assure Hazel that he was indeed pretty close to leveling up, but Zanie spoke first.
“It’s gone now,” Zanie lifted the paper to fan herself with it.
“How are you feeling?” Jeremy asked. “I know the life sense version is pretty exhausting.”
“Yeah, but we were casting that back before we leveled up.” Zanie pointed out. “Plus, just one time isn’t too bad. I feel fine.”
“Good!” Caleb patted Jeremy on the back and gestured to the long stretch of empty highway in front of them. “We should keep moving along then so that we can get to the next town and find a hotel room. I’d like to sleep in a bed instead of the tents for a night.”
Jeremy shrugged, and they set off again, trudging down the median. Tomorrow, he would have to ask Caleb if he could figure out a route that would not take them straight down the highway, where the sunbaked asphalt and occasional sound barriers turned their path into an oven from hell.
When he adjusted the straps of his bags, the spot where it rested over his shirt was damp with sweat. It would be nice if they could at least travel with some tree cover. But this stretch of highway did not seem to have any. Not that they would do too much good against the humidity. But none of that mattered to him right now because he was so excited that they had figured something out.
Even if it had not been a type of spell that he wanted to find or create, just being able to experiment about and swap out a rune and make a spell that did something slightly different was fun. Kind of like playing around with their magic types to create different offensive spells and barriers.
“What are you gonna call this spell, Jeremy?” Caleb asked as they walked along. “Since you are the one who created it. At least as far as we know. It could be in that book somewhere or a dungeon, I guess.”
“The radar spell,” Jeremy suggested with a shrug. Caleb’s entire face scrunched up in disgust. Even Hazel, who was getting a translation into his own language, looked unimpressed.
Atticus still lounged in his arms like a little queen, which was good because she probably shouldn’t be so close to the asphalt when it was rippling with heat anyway. She had been walking in the grass on the median to avoid burning her paws because she was far smarter than Jeremy ever remembered her being, but her body was still a lot closer to the heat coming off the road surface.
“No.” Zanie scoffed. “Are you dumb? In this case, it would be the scan spell for alliteration.”
Caleb’s face swiftly transitioned from disgusted to delighted. He loved to take any chance to make fun of Jeremy, and apparently, Zanie doing so was extremely amusing to him. Jeremy crossed his arms and looked off to the side with a huff. But he could not keep the smile off of his face.
The spell had worked. This was the first step to creating something so that everyone would be able to see the world of magic around them and begin to understand it. He just had to work on refining it so that it was more easily accessible.
“We should try to figure out some type of stats for this, like in a video game,” Caleb suggested. “That way, people can look at it and be like, Yeah! I’m 80% to Level 1!, or however it ends up working. Instead of just seeing the colors. I mean, even you can’t really tell exactly how leveled people are just from the overlays.”
“No, it’s just an approximation at best.” Jeremy agreed. “That is a good idea. If we are going to make this, we might as well try to make it better than what I can see if we can.”
“That would be really useful for tracking your progress as well,” Zanie said enthusiastically.
“Yeah, but if you are going to track your progress, you need some kind of way to store the data. I mean, unless you are going to keep notes like Grandpa over here.” Caleb gestured to Jeremy, who let his hands drop to his sides and took a menacing step in Caleb’s direction. He squawked and ran around Zanie to hide behind her as they walked. She ignored him completely, lost in thought.
“Maybe I could design an app,” she mused. “Kind of like how people track their diets and whatnot.”
“Or…” Hazel, who had been standing back and watching their enthused brainstorming with a bemused smile on his face, finally chimed in, “You could use mana crystals.”
All three of them blinked expectantly at him.
He cleared his throat. “They could be used to store the information. That is how we would do it, and the crystal could be linked to the spell, so it automatically cataloged the data whenever you cast it.”
“That would be brilliant,” Zanie began folding up the piece of paper with the Life Sense spell on it so she could tuck it into her backpack again. “But we would need more mana crystals. So far, we’ve only found two, and one is already enchanted.”
She plucked the mana crystal they had received as a reward from the lightning dungeon from the front pocket of her backpack and held it up. “We’ll have to find more if we are going to use them.”