The spell itself was quiet and forceless, a subtle thing.

At 0.1 mana/days per second, the amount of mana he initially tested with, the bullet he held pinched between two fingers of his right hand leapt forward, a slight tug rapidly turning into a rotating, forward motion that had it tugging out from his fingers before he could even intentionally release it. It was an impossible amount of force, the most he'd seen generated from such a comparably low amount of mana so far.

The bullet shot downrange, accelerating so that in a bare fraction of a second it was invisible. There were no sounds, no pyrotechnics, only a faint puff of dust in the distance to mark that the bullet had found its target; the ground far to the side and in front of one of the training dummies.

He tried again, grabbing another bullet from his left hand and holding it up, pinched between his forefingers. At 0.5 mana-days/second, it fled from his hand fast enough to leave a red mark on his bare thumb and finger where he'd been gripping it slightly, as if he'd pressed his hand briefly against a sander or something. It was a little high for his needs at the moment, so he dialed down the mana cost to 0.25.

He left his System's spreadsheet cursor on the spell as he fired off the rest of the rounds, struggling to dial in his targeting. They were wildly inconsistent, however, much to his increasing frustration.

He realized quickly that Gideon's flicks of the wrist had been either misdirection or him retrieving bullets from his magical ring of storage. Oliver had no such ring, so he simply passed bullets from one hand to the other as Gideon handed them to him from a seemingly endless supply.

"Keep trying," said Gideon as Oliver ran out of bullets again. "You'll get the hang of it. And remember, you're not throwing this thing." Towards the end Oliver had tried throwing the bullet before activating the spell, hoping that the natural movement would help his reflexes to take over. They had not. "The spell takes care of the movement. You just need to handle aiming it."

The target remained standing, infuriatingly, as he whipped out a few more rounds. He just couldn't seem to hit the target, had to get the trick of aiming without iron sights to help him.

A thought occurred to him as Gideon watched unobtrusively, seemingly reluctant to offer tips or explanations. He tried extending a strand of mana down his arm to his hand and a few inches out from his palm, tying it to the movement of the channel from which it extruded in his wrist. A simple flex of the will left the strand of mana straight and inflexible, and found that using it as a pointer he was able to improve his aim somewhat, but it was a time-consuming process and he had to re-extrude it.

"I think it's time for something else," said Gideon as Oliver turned to him for the n-th time, out of ammo once more. He didn't pass him another handful of bullets.

"Any suggestions?"

"Let's try a room clearing exercise."

"How will that help if I can't even aim down-range?" Oliver asked.

"I often find necessity to precede invention," said Gideon. "Let's see how you do in a higher-pressure situation."

A snap of the fingers later, they were standing in a ruined room, smashed walls revealing a street filled with rubble outside. Sound too joined the illusion for the first time, explosions and screaming in the distance.

The effect was immediate. Oliver's pulse accelerated in a matter of seconds and he found himself falling into a mindless crouch.

"I'm low on mana," he said, standing up straighter when he realized what had happened. Each casting of the spell consumed about a tenth of a mana-day, and while he'd started with a good amount he was now down to only a couple left; it wasn't enough, likely.

Gideon raised his hand, holding twelve more rounds. Oliver took the double-handful carefully, and realized that Gideon in the same motion had given him a dash of mana; fifty three.

"Your target's in the back room, being held hostage by a number of hostiles; assume no friendlies in the exercise and use whatever force you deem necessary," said Gideon.

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Oliver readied himself for the charge, stuffing most of the bullets in the left pocket of his rough trousers, leaving six in his left hand and one in his firing hand, his right.

There was a door partially open in front of him.

He paused, thinking of one more eventuality. "What if I run into one of the walls of the room?"

"Don't worry. The simulation rotates around you. You won't notice it, but you'll be running in circles."

Oliver's pulse started to race. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, he felt the excitement building. This was something new.

"And, on my mark, go," said Gideon. Room clearing exercises were timed, usually. Oliver started a timer up in his upper right. He glanced back at Gideon, who nodded, a faint smile on his lips.

Oliver recognized the smile. He didn't like that he recognized it. It was the smile a drill instructor wore when they were having fun.

He answered with a smirk of his own, then burst into the first room. He might have had a lot to learn, but he wasn't in boot camp any more.

There were two hostiles standing in the room, waiting for him, arms already raised in his direction. No dummies these, but what appeared to be living, breathing soldiers of the same nationalities as the Empire soldiers he'd traveled with. Their angry scowls did wonders to clarify his thoughts.

A white laser, rings of differing radii pulsing up and down its length, blasted out of the hand of the farther soldier towards him. That did even more to focus him.

He reacted instantly, muscles primed for action from his adventures of duress under the past few weeks. He leapt to the side, putting the second hostile, slower to react, between him and the first.

He put a bullet in the sternum of the closer soldier, impossible to miss at such close range, sending him flying back with a cut-off wuff of air leaving his lungs and forcing him into the laser from the first man. The first man had to divert the laser to avoid injuring his companion. Oliver took advantage of the intentionally created confusion.

Another bullet had found its way into his waiting right hand without conscious action on his part, and it leapt out of his hand past the incapacitated hostile towards the one wielding the laser. It collided hard, sending the second man crashing into the wall behind him.

A last flickering line of white light licked out towards Oliver as the man slid gurgling to the floor. It scoured his chest, leaving a faint mark on his shirt even as it flickered out. The spell, and the pain it inflicted, was real.

How?

Oliver spared a chance to up the mana cost of the bullet spell. The bullet had taken too long to accelerate from his hand towards the man, resulting in suboptimal disablement.

The next room held a single man, also watching the door. Oliver peeked, hand out in front of him, then fired a bullet before the man even noticed him.

He followed every tactic in the rule book as he cleared each room, taking down six more people before he reached the last room. Each time, the bullet spell proved to be more efficient than whatever enchantments they could bring to bear on him, ending each engagement before it even began.

The magic-wielding hostiles seemed to be portrayed as low-level grunts, disposable cannon fodder meant to guard a low-importance base or something. But the spells they were wielding seemed real and sure hurt like they were real, and it was absolutely enough to keep him on his toes.

As he stepped into the last room, where a couple of hostiles were holding a single non-combatant hostage, the simulation faded out of view, revealing Gideon standing in the white Construct scene.

"You've done that a time or two, haven't you?" he asked.

Oliver was breathing hard, took a moment to reply. "It's been a while, but it's kind of like riding a bike." Two minutes, twenty two seconds from start to finish.

"You realize you're the only person to clear that exercise on the first try. With a spell you've never even seen before."

Oliver shrugged in response. Gideon seemed non-plussed for a moment, then seemed to move on.

"What did you notice about the spell?"

Oliver rallied his thoughts. Several things had jumped out at him throughout the exercise. "It accelerates like a rocket at first, it's not like a bullet, with a single explosion propelling it. Also, aiming was hard until I imagined it falling towards the target. Then something seemed to click, and it just became like dropping the bullet towards the target. Hard, but not impossible. How is it so powerful? I barely spent any mana."

"The spell is redirecting the force of gravity, making use of existing energy to propel the bullet rather than using its own."

"But doesn't that mean it should hit terminal velocity at some point?" A penny dropped from a building wouldn't end up going fast enough to kill somebody, and this bullet, clay though it was, wasn't much heavier.

"I never said it was using the force of the bullet's own gravity. You saw the strand of mana that attached to the bullet at first, before snapping? The spell redirects your own gravitation pull against the much smaller mass of the bullet, forcing it through the air much more quickly than it would if it were simply the bullet's own weight pulling it down. We're powering the spell with gravity itself. It's a novel concept around here."

"Makes sense. Again?" Oliver itched to challenge the run. He flicked on a new timer in his system, wanting to see if he could beat the time of the last couple of runs. He stretched as the room reset around him, dissolving into blurs that resolved into the starting room once more.

Magic.