The following months were spend mostly in silence. Everyone kept working hard on their magic. Kayley was somewhat unhappy since she couldn’t practice pill-making but it wasn’t something they could do anything about currently.
Villin and Amelia started practicing ‘Cut and Crease’ a good while ago as well, even though Villin stood no chance against her normally they soon decided on a few handicaps to make things fairer. After a bit of time Rein began practicing ‘Cut and Crease’ as well, showing a good amount of talent.
With all three others doing it Kayley naturally also joined in and so every day the room would have pieces of paper flying all over for an hour.
Everyone got more skilled at their spells and learned the ones they had the books for. The only exception was Villin, he just couldn’t cast ‘Lanuae Magicae’. The spell was very hard and Villin just couldn’t get past connecting ten of its nodes. Even though he looked forward to being able to teleport, he had to put it aside for now.
Instead of focusing further on that, he spent his time making a number of derivatory spells. The only spells he stayed away from were ‘Fireball’, ‘Icy Pike’, ‘Vococito’, and the healing spells.
As for why? Villin was afraid he could get seriously hurt if he changed the wrong nodes with these ones.
But for the other ones, he had made over a dozen new derivatory spell models. Most of them were mostly useless, changing the properties of a spell slightly. But there was one that he found particularly useful.
Changing one of the nodes from ‘Reverto’ he found a way to change the spell’s color. After experimenting for a good while, the spell became invisible when the right node was used. Hence, if he put in the effort, he could cast the spell in secret without letting anyone else know visually.
‘Vinea Tenura’, and ‘Illuminatus’ had also profited a fair bit from their derivatory spells. The former got a large number of small differences, at this point Villin could decide what angle the vines would attack in and what area would have the most vines, alongside an overall increase of effectiveness.
As for ‘Illuminatus’, he found a way to control the light output and even the shape of the light. Hence both of these spells became more useful overall.
Today he was working on derivatory spells for Sheldium but thus far most of the ones he tried made the spell weaker. After casting another derivatory spell, this time making the shield around him clearly visible, he once more crouched down and began writing his findings in a book.
The big notebook already had many pages filled with information. Now that there was little else he could do, Villin had completely thrown himself into studying his web. Kayley had actually done a similar thing since she recalled the advice she had been given by the teachers at the advanced tournament. The two of them could often be seen discussing the web and its functions.
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Even though Kayley wasn’t quite as good as Villin in the matter discussing things aided both of them. A good example came up a few weeks earlier. Villin got a bit confused when working on ‘Reverto’, for the life of him he couldn’t figure out the use of certain nodes, he changed them but nothing happened, the spell still looked and did the same.
Now Kayley had faced similar nodes in her own studies but had actually found out some of the purposes some of these nodes had. Hence, she suggested Villin tried to send some magic through it from the inside.
Villin did and noticed the spells disappeared upon contact, feeding the shield’s power, while on the outside it stayed the same and repelled spells sent at it.
Most of the time they were wrong about the proper usage of nodes but as they kept trying to use certain nodes in different spells they started understanding some of the runes to a certain degree. What they really needed were more spells, with more spells in the areas of nodes they were testing they would have a clearer idea, nonetheless, they were still happy with their findings.
But well, it looked like soon they would be able to learn more spells. The four of them left the hotel taking all of their stuff with them and took the car. Then, they headed to the meeting point where they were supposed to meet Gerry.
Two days later they arrived at the approximate location as they parked the car alongside the road. The four of them actually looked rather relaxed. They were no longer scared of this world as they were so long ago. But they were also very thankful, without the rings Gerry gave them, it was unlikely they would’ve been able to act so carefreely.
They didn’t have to wait for all that long as two hours later they saw a figure flying toward them from a distance. When he got closer they all recognized the man that seemed to be twenty.
“Good to see you kids are alright. Give me back the rings for now, no use wearing those now.” the man said with little emotion in his voice.
The quartet obliged and gave him the rings with little hesitation, then they saw Gerry enter the car by its driver seat “Well, get in then. Time to get you kids back to The Academy.”
A few minutes later they were headed north in the car. The ride felt slightly uncomfortable as nobody talked but soon the four kids were in the process of awakening nodes once again. This had become the habit when Kayley was driving, they really hadn’t been wasting any time while they were here.
A few days of driving later, only stopping to get food, the group was nearing their destination. They all saw they were getting pretty close to a mountain, the closer they got, the worse the road got. At this point, the dirt road was full of potholes.
Once they passed the last village about five kilometers away from the foot of the mountain, there was no longer a road to speak off. The car really was amazing, usually, someone would get shaken up terribly when going offroad like this, cars of this world generally wouldn’t even be able to handle it. But this truck was absolutely fine, and the shaking wasn’t nearly as bad compared to how Villin expected it to be.
When the car arrived at the foot of the mountain Gerry got out of the car and spoke up. “Let’s get up the mountain now shall we?”