Even if we took into account the minimum possible casting requirements for Gate due to upgrades, Midnight was still a long way off from being able to cast it alone. He would need more than a handful of levels to barely complete it- any less might not even finish creation of the portal, let alone give time to go through it. He was a full dozen levels behind me when considering being able to cast the spell at full power, and even then, casting a spell like that at the fatigue threshold made me uncomfortable about the spell being properly sustained.

Given a similar rate of advancement, it would only take him a couple years- but that wasn’t actually sustainable. Unless we kept fighting stronger and stronger opponents to keep maintaining our growth, but that was likely to result in a battle going against us sooner rather than later. And depending on who we were up against, that could be the end of our career. Handface had obviously been trying to kill us. Doctor Doomsday probably would, if he considered us inconvenient. Gloom and Darkstargirl… well, one might want to kill us, and we would certainly suffer greatly if we lost to them.

But the point was, even though I liked fighting I knew we couldn’t remain at our same rate of growth forever. We’d already sparred with most of the people in the Brigade a dozen times at least, and there was some limit to how much we could train with outsiders.

Not that I was disappointed in our growth. In slightly more than a year, I had gone from barely any experience to something expected of a proper experienced mage, it wasn’t surprising if things would slow down a bit. And if it only took Midnight 2-3 years, that was significantly better from the ‘expected’ 5-10 years of adulthood studies to reach level 30. Combat experience was good for him as well- just not as much as for myself, who could only receive such experience.

But the point was that Midnight could still cast Gate as long as we worked together. He’d done it before, returning his people to Celmoth. We’d mainly had hesitations about being able to return as we couldn’t guarantee the difficulty would be the same in both directions. That issue was less of a concern now, with my larger mana pool. I should be able to get us somewhere, even if we had to return home from another world.

It came to my attention that we hadn’t attempted to open a Gate directly to Celmoth from Earth before. It had been from my old world. But I quashed that thought and didn’t bring it up with Midnight, as he was just finished psyching himself up. It was one thing to send some people back home, and another to potentially return himself.

“I can do two thirds,” Midnight said. “Leaving one third to you.” I nodded. Managing a ratio like that would probably be best. I felt him begin gathering mana, and joined in, lending my power to his image.

Space itself expanded from a single point, the wall in front of us replaced by a previously seen view looking out of what was apparently a teleporter- I still hadn’t seen them used, so I could only take his word for it. The Gate was a bit wobblier than before, but it was better than that one time we had made a portal to Mars.

“See, nothing to worry about,” I said to Midnight. “Except for anything you might have forgotten about.”

“Like what?” Midnight asked.

“I don’t know, something about bringing someone through a portal at some point?”

The portal closed.

“... I haven’t contacted my mother in over a week,” Midnight said.

“I’d suggest the excuse that one of your friends was dying.”

“That’s true, though.”

“You could have still snuck in 10 mana somewhere this week,” I said. “It’s still an excuse. Just a good one.”

Midnight grumbled.

“So what do you think about the portal stability?” I asked.

“Good enough to bring someone through,” Midnight admitted. “If they were waiting properly. But going through ourselves… still has issues.”

“I felt some level of mana there,” I said. “And we could definitely bring enough mana crystals to get back. But first you should probably fulfill that earlier promise.”

-----

Even though she was quite eager to visit, there were still some steps we had to go through for Jet to visit Earth and she needed some time to be prepared. She had responsibilities and things which prevented her from just hopping between worlds whenever she wanted. Sounded like a pain.

But I had other things to work on anyway. Things like trying to find permanent portals between worlds using Scrying. Which hadn’t been working great before everything with Handface, but a week of trying to deal with magical resistance and constantly casting the spell had resulted in another upgrade. Actually, there had been quite a few of those from various things.

Turlough (No surname)

Level: 35

Experience: 3225/3330

Storage +9 (6|3)

Firebolt +5 (3|2)

Shocking Grasp +7 (4|3)

Grease +3 (2|1)

Force Armor +9 (6|3)

Mage's Reach +5 (3|2)

Translation +3 (1|2)

Alter Time Flow +7 (4|3)

Disguise

Familiar Bond +8 (4|4)

Enlarge +3 (2|1)

Energy Ward +4 (2|2)

Sonic Lance +5 (3|2)

Advanced Divination Magic +7 (3|4)

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Shield +2 (1|1)

Stoneskin +6 (4|2)

Mana Crystal Deposition +6 (2|4)

Water Breathing

Variable Freedom +3 (2|1)

Basic Light Magic +2 (1|1)

Alter Portal +2 (0|2)

Gate +4 (2|2)

Sending +2 (0|2)

Chain Lightning +5 (3|2)

Clean +1 (0|1)

Shelter +1 (0|1)

Assistive Familiar Casting +3 (0|3)

Multicasting +1 (0|1)

Enhance +1

Nondetection +2 (0|2)

Remaining Points: 36

I had upgraded a couple things with points- notably Stoneskin before our raid, since I wanted to minimize holes in people that came with destroyed organs. Other things had improved naturally. Gate was a surprise, since it was a particularly high level spell.

Natural upgrades to Force Armor and Storage happened to put the final upgrade outside of the boundary of Familiar Bond. That wasn’t too important at the moment, but it was something to consider in the future. The last tiny bit of efficiency wasn’t too important there, though Midnight had used Storage to great effect when helping Sprint get juiced up. That might have been a contributing factor to the upgrade, I supposed.

Further uses of Scrying, now part of Advanced Divination Magic, didn’t reveal much from my previous world. I kept getting stuck up around large cities, and I hadn’t yet confirmed whether my methods would actually find portals or just high concentrations of magic so it wasn’t useful. At least I was learning to tune out particular places a little bit at a time.

I was hesitant to do anything of the sort on Earth, and especially within New Bay. Because most likely, I would stumble into Doctor Doomsday’s operations, learn nothing of value, and draw his ire. And I would be perfectly happy if nobody I knew was kidnapped by him in the future ever again. Just because things had ultimately worked out with Ceira’s survival didn’t mean we’d be so lucky in the future.

Was I letting myself be intimidated by a bully? Yeah, probably. But I had to have a vaguely realistic understanding of my own strength to survive. And where I found myself was still insufficient.

-----

The Brigade’s shooting range had all sorts of targets to accommodate various weapons or different powers. It was pretty easy to get flame resistant targets- with my level of power, they might as well have been completely fireproof. It was probably impossible to make anything absolutely impervious to heat of any level- there was no upper limit on temperature as far as people were aware- but there were various thresholds to consider. But my magic was just at the level of normal- if magical- flames.

Firebolt was my one fire spell, and my first offensive spell. Which also made it useless for most of my career, because I didn’t have any enemies to attack. Shocking Grasp toned down could be an annoyance, but a small spark from Firebolt could still light clothes on fire. I doubt I would have survived in Mossley if I set people on fire or burned down people’s shops. I was fortunate that the forest was quite wet, or I might have made some serious mistakes in my early days.

As for what I was doing, training a weak spell that I hardly ever used… well, that was the point. I wanted it to not be weak, and to at least be able to use it sometimes. Its damage potential was in some ways lower than a simple handgun, but I was more likely to fight a super who was bullet resistant than fireproof. And while they could be generally resistant to things, there tended to be weaknesses to those with ‘proper’ super powers. Neglecting my only attack of a certain type would be shameful. I couldn’t assume I would be in a team with Shockfire, after all.

There was also another conundrum I was dealing with. Chain Lightning was vastly more powerful than Firebolt- but I’d also spent more than five times as many points on it, with just a purchase and a couple upgrades. This training was ultimately part of a test to determine efficiency.

I needed to confirm a potential theory. It might have been my training being skewed, but it seemed to me that higher level spells gained natural upgrades nearly as quickly as lower level spells. If that was true, then spending points to upgrade lower level spells was actually more efficient. Upgrading a spell cost points equal to its level, approximately. Upgrading Gate was ten times as many points as upgrading Firebolt. I could make Firebolt nearly fifty percent stronger and a quarter cheaper than its already upgraded state for the same price as upgrading Gate once, which would improve it about ten percent.

With my natural upgrades in Gate having reached two, that wasn’t so far behind my highest spells at four. I was quite certain each natural upgrade got harder but… I had to determine the time efficiency of training.

And perhaps training Firebolt like this was pointless. It wasn’t being used for its intended purpose. Combat would probably be better, but obviously Aspect of the Barbarian didn’t limit me in the same ways as my actual level. Otherwise, half of my spells would never get natural upgrades. Using Haste in combat might do something, but Gate had literally never been used in combat. There was strain in using it, but it wasn’t battle. It was basically exercise. Normal training.

In short, either I would determine some way to speed up my gain in Firebolt- which would then mean I could focus on Shocking Grasp or other spells I used frequently- or I would determine that spell level had a much smaller factor on natural upgrades compared to point upgrades. Since it was a factor of ten to one with Firebolt and Gate… I should be able to figure it out soon. But in truth, I hadn’t really spent the same effort making Firebolt work as Gate or Scrying. A week or more of spending all of my mana on either of those two spells was just part of what I’d done.

I might have exhausted myself casting Firebolt at a rock when I was younger, but that would have been a handful of casts in a single session after which I would have probably counted myself as done for the day. Now I could cast more than thirty Firebolts before being exhausted, and do that several times throughout the day- or split up into a larger number of sessions.

My improved mana recovery from practicing meditation and the convenient and concerning growth of ambient mana levels in New Bay also improved the maximum amount I could manage in a day, ignoring all other factors.

I cast just all of my Firebolts at the ‘natural’ level. With five upgrades, the mana cost was 1.6 per cast. Overcasting to maximize my power was limited to mana equal to the spell level, which was 2. I could manage about twenty-five casts, if I only used those. But that was the plan for next week, to see if I could determine any difference between the two methods of training.

Something I’d learned from managing more difficult spells was that there were technique improvements that didn’t show in the upgrades. For example, Scrying Handface while he had magical resistance. Midnight and I got a single upgrade during that time, but we weren’t merely ten percent more effective. At least against our particular target, it was a world of difference- from a few seconds of his image with the world around him blurred beyond any recognition, we had sometimes upwards of a minute where we could see at least a few foot radius around him properly.

A year or so ago, I would have completely rejected the notion that upgrades didn’t represent the whole of proficiency with a given spell. But I also would have rejected the idea of ‘natural’ upgrades. This was just another thing people had been trained not to think about… or perhaps this was an issue with me in particular. I would have to talk to Sir Kalman. Knights certainly still trained in ways other than sparring, didn’t they? They must understand there was some value to it.

Master Uvithar would have likely been able to explain some of this. He hadn’t discouraged me from practicing spells where it was safe, even if I didn’t get experience for it like the other apprentices. If only I’d known enough to ask the right questions at the time…

Well, I couldn’t exactly say I would have preferred my life to take a different trajectory than it was currently on. Because I was quite happy, especially with one particular individual no longer trying to kill my friends. A life of training myself and fighting against people with powers? It was better than I could have ever imagined. And uncovering mysteries about magic, when I thought studying was pointless- and in some ways it had been- that was an amazing shift.

I grinned as I shot my last Firebolt for the session, focusing on hitting a specific part of the target. Accuracy certainly wasn’t determined by points. I couldn’t slack off there.

Whichever result I got from this experiment, I was going to… how would people here say it? Ah yes, ‘game the system’. Though in a way, one could say that eating healthy and following a good physical training plan worked for normal humans even without a ‘system’. It was just less visible, and that was what I needed to focus on, rather than the numbers. But numbers were good too.