Some decades ago — Jon still remembered — he’d taken specialist language classes for Peruvian Spanish in a white, air-conditioned classroom. Why he remembered that particular class and not the others, he could only guess it was because of the lemon-scented air fresheners the professor had kept on hanging in front of the A/C before the start of each class.

All there had ever been was the sound of the professor speaking with zero English and the humming accompaniment of the air conditioner; at some point, the air conditioner started to sound like it was in Spanish, too. He and his classmates remained deathly silent, only ever speaking when it came time to practice.

Studying anything required focus, while noise tended to distract. Still, for some reason, some kinds of noise were okay — a busy cafe, train station, or even the deep air horns of passing cargo trucks were easy enough for the brain to tune out. On the other hand, the scratching of a pencil in an otherwise quiet room could grate on other people’s nerves.

It was all about the randomness of the noise. The individual sounds of the hustle and bustle of a city was, for all intents and purposes, truly random, so the brain found it easy to tune out. A crunching leaf in a silent forest, on the other hand, sent the brain panicking.

How about an on-going battle outside the window, then? Screaming, gunfire, and artillery — all things that happened all the time in a battlefield, so why should the brain pay any attention to it?

The squelching sound of flesh being cleaved through by a monster-hunting sword, which itself made a whoosh sound each time it was swung, and then five seconds later to be countered by a concentrated attack of dozens of spells and explosives — now, that caught the brain’s attention.

Jon tried very hard to ignore it in favor of understanding the diagram Wiz had scratched onto a chalkboard; he was standing there, his back turned and a stick of chalk in hand while Jon listened, hunched over, from the edge of the bed. Alyssa was nearby on his side of the room, sitting on a proper chair while crossing her legs in a vain attempt at maintaining a lady-like appearance. Her left wrist was splinted and dressed with a thick layer of bandages.

All the while, the old man raved about his “groundbreaking discoveries” for the better part of an hour now.

He reminded Jon of a tunnel rat he’d met in Vietnam, then later on again in Florida some thirty years later, in very different circumstances. Long story short, the diagrams that man scratched in his underground bunker’s walls looked a lot like whatever Wiz was drawing. Even the enthusiasm of it was a spitting image.

Just like that tunnel rat, though, Wiz wasn’t pulling things out of his ass. Even if half of that tunnel rat’s conspiracy theories were wrong, the other half let him evade the CIA for a long time. Though, he’d been caught, eventually; he’d slipped up on thinking the CIA was using birds. They weren’t. They were using bats.

Given that Wiz about to “die” and run away from everything, Jon would say he and the tunnel rat had just about enough similarities.

The only things he gently understood from Wiz’s ravings was that magic and Skills ran on the same fuel, just from different sources. Magic ran on anything it could get its hands on, and Skills, from the world’s goddesses. If someone wanted to use Skills, they’d need a contract — a System — between them and a goddess.

They called the fuel “mana,” but no one really knew what it was. Wiz said he knew, though.

He said it was “condensed causality.”

Wiz was the only person who knew what that even meant. Jon gently let it pass through one ear and out the other. Alyssa did the same, but with a smile.

At the very least, it was clearly something that deeply supported this world’s reality. No mana meant no reality.

Onto more practical matters. “Magic and Systems?” Jon curtly asked. He only knew that the two interacted, but he didn’t know why. Seeing that he’d fought enough people with Systems — and he was apt to fight more — some theoretical understanding would be necessary to come up with creative hacks and exploits against them.

Really, how many people had Systems? Not everyone had one, but it somehow seemed the two Sisters weren’t stingy about handing them out, either, and they didn’t seem to care too much about who was using them, or even what they were being used for.

“Not it, sir,” Wiz said. “Systems have rules.”

Ravena’s rules were more stringent, and the Systems she gave out were more specialized. Jon’s, for example, was an Assassin System specially tailored for him; all Assassin Systems exhibited kill-based mechanics, like skill-stealing or life-stealing, but after probing Wiz with a few indirect questions, Jon thought his might be the first one that used a kill counter instead of an EXP meter.

What could he say? A life was a life.

Lumina’s rules were more like suggestions, offering greater freedom and versatility in exchange for slow growth. Anyone could gain any Skill through a myriad of ways — buying it, practicing it, or even participating in mundane to bizarre rituals — and then grow those Skills by accumulating EXP.

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However, Luminar EXP meters had bizarre and, to put it nicely, “individualized” ways of calculating and meting out EXP rewards. Monster hunters regularly reported gaining slightly dissimilar EXP rewards despite killing the same monster. As for upgrades, the simplest Systems leveled individual Skills, while the most complex ones leveled the person’s Level, which then unlocked those Skills for further upgrades, which have to be purchased from some sort of divine repository, the exact appearance and offerings of which also depended on the user.

It was as if the programmer was just brute-forcing the search for the most optimal user experience ... by indiscriminately deploying every possible permutation of all available features.

Magic, on the other hand, was a whole different beast.

Jon — and Alyssa, for that matter — only knew, up until this point, that it used one’s own life. That wasn’t quite it.

It used whatever was available.

There was mana permeating the world around them, obeying its own currents independent of the wind and sea; at least this much was a classical and proven concept. Magic didn’t consume one’s life if kept below a certain level, and there were places where mana was “thicker,” where stronger magic could be used without repercussion.

Magic would first use the mana around the user. If that wasn’t enough, their life was used — was also another classical concept, but also a problematic one.

It’s difficult to precisely measure just how many days or years, exactly, are consumed when using gluttinous magic. The best predictive precision anyone had ever achieved was measured in decades.

On top of that, the existence of multiple independent reincarnated individuals in the historical record, all claiming to have died from mana exhaustion, proves without a doubt that one’s soul — that strange thing that contained one’s essence — wasn’t consumed at all.

This was where Wiz found a solution.

“Why do we need to focus when using magic? Why can we use magic at all?” Wiz posed such questions to himself many decades ago, and now, he posed it for the two. “I have no doubt that it is not the soul which is consumed, but one’s will.”

Willpower was the bridge between the soul and the world, the method by which the soul affects the world’s reality. In most situations, the soul only wills the body to move, affecting the body’s mana, operating its organs to be a living, breathing organism.

Under great focus, however, and the soul can stretch its willpower to extend beyond the body — affecting the mana of the external world.

“I once knew a great mage,” Wiz recounted, “who died from a heart attack in the middle of casting the most beautiful magic I had ever seen.”

— The man’s willpower had stretched so thin, that it forgot to operate the body’s heart.

Willpower wasn’t just a thing that manipulates mana. It was also mana itself, albeit one too elusive to detect without the most powerful detection Skills.

Although Wiz’s first impression came from Jon’s handling of his magic chain, Wiz’s Mana Sense showed him the rest — that this man in front of him was the type whose body would continue to move on pure will alone, long after its heart had stopped.

“Sir Jon,” Wiz called out before they left the room, “I have one last lesson for you.”

The three set out with Wiz at the lead. He stopped a short distance down the hallway, right beside a vulnerable load-bearing column half-set into the wall. He got to work with a chisel, chipping out an intricate, circular pattern on the column’s face.

“How does that even work?” Alyssa asked. “I understand all that talk about willpower, but letters chipped into rocks shouldn’t have any willpower, should they?”

“You’re quite right, lady, it doesn’t.” Wiz chuckled, waiting for Alyssa’s confused reaction.

“Do stop pulling on my leg, it might come off.” Alyssa sighed. “Spill the beans, old man.”

“How rude. I’m a lord, you know?”

“Not anymore. Now spill it.”

“Fine, as you wish.” Wiz finished up on the last glyph, completing a 50-glyph spell circle about a meter in diameter. To Alyssa, it just looked like the crazed writings of a madman who’d been locked up for 20 years.

“That,” Wiz continued, pointing at the spell circle, “is the physical representation of the damage I’ve inflicted on the natural mana currents here.”

Alyssa crossed her arms, still somehow annoyed that Wiz wouldn’t just — out with it already. “How do you mean?”

“The Order would win the day before I could explain to you how exactly mana is manipulated, so for now, be content with knowing that there are several types of mana, and some of them can interact with other mana, and others have better permanence.”

Wiz pointed to himself. “Willpower is one such kind of mana with great permanence and control power. Its versatility is so great, that it can convert other mana into control mana.”

He then pointed at the spell, pausing for a few seconds. “Do you understand?”

“Then why the spell circle, when you could just use magic normally to make this ‘control mana’ you speak of?” Alyssa asked.

Wiz smiled. It’s been a while since someone had asked him so many questions. All the others just wanted to kill things flashier. “Because this isn’t just control mana, you see. Creating control mana is, itself, an intense task for one’s willpower, which is why” — he pointed at the middle of the spell circle, which held a single glyph — “only a small part of the spell is actually control mana, while the rest is called ‘break mana.’ ”

He looked at Alyssa, and her eyes were impatient. Wonderful enthusiasm. He just couldn’t get enough of it ... now, if only his actual disciple was as enthusiastic as her. Sigh.

“Break mana,” he continued, “deflects mana. That’s all it does — but, most types of mana, when concentrated enough, will exhibit strange properties which we then use to achieve any desired effect.”

He showed his chisel. “To make break mana, you need to use concentrated control mana. The use of instruments with points and edges aids in doing this. By setting break mana into certain patterns, we can choose which kinds of mana to meaningfully deflect, in whatever concentration we will, to whatever effects we desire” —

“What’s Fire and Ice Manipulation?” Jon asked, catching Wiz’s attention.

For a second, he didn’t understand the question, but going by the context of the lesson just now... “What a philosophical question,” Wiz remarked. Perhaps Jon was just a deep thinker who preferred to hear everything before asking things, after all.

To answer Jon, the Academy’s accepted theory was lacking. Just, really, what kind of bollocks was “It’s a subset of elemental manipulation Skills.” What a non-answer!

Wiz had his own theory, one that Jon might just find useful. “I’d studied the structures of those two Skills some time ago,” he said. “They’re both purely made of break mana. Fire is structured to efficiently, but indiscriminately, concentrate mana, while Ice is structured to disperse it.”

That’s it. That was all that Jon needed to know. He might just be able to kill Bowyer — if it came down to it, anyway.