It was immediately clear to him as he witnessed Myrddin creating the spell that it would be no easy matter to disrupt.

He watched through the ancient man's own eyes as, dark-robed and dim of sight, he passed down the first spellforms to his young apprentice. It had been a stroke of genius, or perhaps madness, that had enabled him to create the System. The spell was a simulacrum, a likeness, of his own mind, faithfully recreated by magic and mercifully bereft of consciousness. To create it at all had been daring, perhaps insane; a newborn mind that lived in a void, with no senses to perceive or interact with the world was a horror which Oliver was uniquely suited to appreciate.

But it could have been nothing else, for no primitive man such as he could have come up with the fractal, organic whorls of looping mana threads that so closely mimicked the brain patterns of a thinking being.

And it was this fundamentally limited, yet artfully patterned spell that continued to grow as a mind, incorporating the apprentice's spells into its own knowledge and passing them on. The spells — memories — how else could they have been recorded, structured in such a way that another human mind could access and understand them?

And therein lay the difficulty. The human mind was notoriously complicated; it was still largely unknown to even the science of Oliver's day; remove vast swatches of the mind and it might still function unchanged; yet a tiny piece might prove key to its functioning in some unforeseeable way.

How, then, was the magical lobotomy to be accomplished? Oliver didn't know where to start, what to prune or what to add that might change the functioning of this vast mind, grown and bloated even farther beyond understanding than it had been at the moment of its conception; for it had grown to encompass the experiences of many, many lives.

It was not long, dwelling in the vast darkness as he did, before Oliver arrived at an answer. If he could not destroy of a surety the spell itself, then he could disrupt its link to its owner; the reference that a mage's mind had to any particular spell — including the original System spell — was the weak point: a single link binding a mind to a spellform.

It was this link that mana itself traversed, Oliver saw it now, this link that bound the knowledge of the greatest mages of the past to the mana of even the simplest mind of today.

Suppressing the mana link entirely was one thing; this was, he saw, what had been done to him multiple times, including by Polephenes and (he now realized) the rune-wards of holding cells in the Empire's war-camp. It was done by brute force, overwhelming the mana of the target and their natural aura defenses to affect the mind directly. It disrupted the link between a mage and the System spell so completely that their mana would have no place to go, only build up within them until it reached the critical point of dispersion.

Oliver saw straightaway that doing this would be impossible in the case of the archmage; his own mana was far too pitiful and scant to overwhelm that of Alloman's; another way, therefore, was needed.

He spent long thinking and dwelling in that space; spared from the vulgar needs of biology, his mind ranged far and free outside of time until at last he arrived at a solution which even his innate risk-aversion was satisfied by, and his inner engineer found elegant: instead of destroying the System, he would simply show the enemy archmage what it truly was; he would replace Alloman's System spell, with Oliver's own: the path of no interface at all, the path of nothingness, the path of the void.

Oliver's mind could barely cope with the void System, formed as it was by science, logic and technology, inundated by modern semantic structures and calcified into towering architectures of meaning and abstract systems that the world ran on. English, mathematics, physics; logic. Excel. File systems. Programming. The concept of the number zero.

These were all things that these primitive peoples did not possess, things they could only crudely approximate by building physical constructs to mold their minds to, their mean temples and paths and so on, things which barely allowed them to scratch the surface of the possibilities magic afforded.

No, the archmage's untrained mind would not long survive the ravages of the Underpinnings; of that, Oliver was certain.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

That left only one thing: how would he grant him the new spell? In the end, that too was simple. Oliver's research ended in an efficient explanation; why was it that each time a spell had been granted to him it had been through physical touch? What had physical proximity and channeling mana to do with one another?

It turned out to be a simple matter of economics. The less distance that mana had to travel to create an effect, the less expensive it was. And as mana was very valuable indeed, the people of this land had naturally found the most efficient possible way to transfer spell references: reducing the distance the reference, encoded into a mana thread, needed to travel down to almost nothing. Physical touch. The mana would travel from the granter's spell channels, to the target's, almost costlessly.

That meant it was still possible to do at range; and this was not something the archmage would have thought to guard against. How could the simple granting of a spell, a thing ordinarily only beneficial, be a physical attack? It was a simple additive thing; at most, a spell could only add to your opponent's capabilities, not destroy them. It wasn't an attack through magic, it was an attack on the archmage's magic itself; a meta-magic, an exploit. Nothing Oliver had seen of magic, and he had seen much, indicated this to be a threat the mages of this world had considered before. It would have been sad, but then again, none of them had had to deal with DDoS attacks, XSS injection, or DNS interception hacks.

In a way, it was very like an autoimmune disease; Oliver himself would do very little; would merely convince the archmage's system to destroy itself, and it would oblige him, rending itself through its own strength.

So Oliver had his weapon, the final iteration of the System spell that was his own destroyed System, and his vector, the basic means of transferring spells; and was thus satisfied.

It was time, he thought, to end this.

—

Coming out of the Second Wind spell was an odd process, for two reasons. It was slow; even after he'd ended the spell, time continued to travel very slowly from Oliver's perspective, though of course it would be speeding up at an imperceptible rate.

The return from the Underpinnings to his own senses was trivial, effortless, a process he'd undergone hundreds, if not thousands of times by now. The void had now become a place of some familiarity, had lost its terror; after the sensory inundation of visiting a thousand, thousand spells, he felt as if his mind would never again need stimulation. It had, he had, changed in ways that made it difficult to tell what he was, anymore.

The reds of the longest waves of light visible to him were the first to return to his sight, shifting slowly at first and then more rapidly into blues and then the natural colors of the dawn he'd left what felt like so very long ago.

He saw the web of the archmage's spell reaching out towards him, formulated a perfect counter-spell with all the leisure of a boy out for a long country walk on a Saturday afternoon.

His body returned to him, then sounds, long stretched out things, moving from tones so low he couldn't hear them up as the vibrations returned to their natural lengths, like the Doppler effect on steroids.

His own mana triggered as his body became once again his own, the web of mana lancing from his own fingertips to fully disrupt the archmage's spell.

Without his System or his mana tracker he couldn't tell how the rate of time was changing, so he could do nothing but be patient. Had it not been for the long period for time took to speed up, he might have been overwhelmed by the sensation. But patience was something he now possessed, and handling curious sensations was something he'd become something of an expert in by now.

And then as if reaching some inflection point, time sped up faster and faster until suddenly it was moving at a normal pace again faster than he'd anticipated. But the spell he'd already begun snapped forward, and cancelled the archmage's disintegration spell completely.

The frown that he'd watched begin now fully spread across the man's face. The archmage spun more shields into existence using spells Oliver had witnessed the very invention of. In that heartbeat, observing the patterns of mana as they wound themselves outward in forms more familiar to him now than the back of his own hand, he saw that the hole must have been the ring the man was wearing on his finger. It was protected by as many potent wards as he'd thought, justifying his decision not to use the nuclear spell. But it was not, Oliver saw with satisfaction, warded against the mere granting of another spell.

"What path do you tread?" the archmage asked curiously, his deep voice resonating across the courtyards.

Oliver took a moment to stand fully, smiled self-consciously, and said "I walk the path of the meta-mage."

"The what?" asked the archmage, looking confused.

"Ugh, it sounded better in my head," Oliver said, cringing, then triggered the spell-granting spell at range, watching as the mana wended out from his fingers lazily, pierced the mage's defenses as if they weren't even there — it was not an assault spell for them to defend against — and connected with one of the mage's own mana streams.

Oliver saw as the archmage received his modified System spell, and when the newest version of the System kicked in, in the change was obvious; the man's image flickered in and out for an instant, and then was gone. The hole in reality vanished entirely, and then the courtyard was empty.

"I should have said metamancer," Oliver concluded with a faint sigh.