There were those moments in life when one came across absurd situations. Meeting a mage who could eat fire, or a beast that could speak, or a mushroom that could levitate was unusual. But once you thought really hard about it, the peculiarities could all be explained away. However, on the other end of the absurdity spectrum were existences that defied logic and any attempts at rationalization.
Aurelia was certain Janet blew even that category of oddness out of the water.
“Aww, the Skills didn’t even yield 1 SP,” she lamented after the Skill Crystals disintegrated into motes of colored mana and simply disappeared.
“You didn’t really learn or create the Skills, did you?” Sylthis asked in an amused tone. “Whoever created the Skill Crystals already was awarded the SP.
Learning Skills from crystals was normal. Not knowing how that worked was also quite normal for a beginner. What wasn’t in any way usual was getting entire manuscripts’ worth of runes and formations stuffed into one’s head – two times at that, and not even wincing as all that knowledge was crammed in there.
“How are you talking right now?” she found herself asking.
Janet looked at her with unfocused eyes. “What are you on about?”
“The Skills!” she exclaimed. “Anyone who learns a Common rarity Skill should get a headache that pretty much puts them out of commission. Do you understand how much information it takes to operate an information gathering Skill? You’re practically learning all of that in an instant!”
“Oh,” Janet chuckled. “Guess I just have a tough brain.” She did not want to talk any further about the anomaly, so Aurelia let it go.
That had been before Janet apparently finished cleansing out the demon’s pernicious Mysteries from her mana system. A First Circle even possessing knowledge of what Mysteries were was absurd. To go even further and interact with them without hyperspecialized equipment and long, custom rituals was beyond ludicrous.
Aurelia reasoned that had she been the one to suffer Janet’s injuries, months of high-tier Healer treatments would have followed, with her remaining bedridden and infirm the entire time.
“Oh, that feels so much better.” Janet sighed as she exhaled green gusts of clearly demonic flame from her nostrils.
“All cleared out?” Sylthis asked as her single eye roamed keenly from Janet’s head to her toes as though she could see through skin.
“I think so,” Janet replied. “The healing’s already kicked in.”
Sylthis pointed to Janet’s abdomen – where there was apparently a hole piercing clean through even though the girl was walking around as if having a hole through one’s torso was not a debilitating, near-fatal injury.
“Have you flushed the hole out?” Sylthis asked the totally normal question. “I can still sense…”
“Oh, the fire Iralith used to inflict that one was different,” she explained almost clinically. “All of the demon’s other flames were produced by igniting its essence. This one,” she rubbed the spot with her finger, “was different.”
“Oh, no.” Sylthis seemed taken aback. Aurelia had to wait before she too had her mind blown.
“I want to see if my body will heal around it, now that I’ve eliminated every other contamination.”
“You can’t seriously expect to acquire demonic magic,” Sylthis chided. “Do you want to die?”
Janet went on to explain how in her fight with the demon – she referred to it by name like they’d been in conversation during the fight – she had managed to fuse her fire with the demon’s, thus allowing her to not just expel it from her body, but also harm the demon with her own mana since the fusion allowed her energies to interact directly with the demon’s anatomy.
“If I face a demon again, which would be such a waste not to,” she panned her gaze through her yet-unclaimed Dead Zone, “then I want to go into the fights knowing my attacks will hurt the bastards from the get-go.”
“Even still, do you know the kind of danger such a Mystery would put you in?”
“Look, I had to create a [Skill] to even injure the demon. It tanked every bolt I had…”
The conversation went back and forth with both sides offering quite compelling arguments. It really did look like a conversation between siblings, which just did not compute. A warrior as powerful as Sylthis should have seen Janet as barely an ant beneath her feet, yet they were holding a conversation as equals!
Even weirder was the arguments at hand. Aurelia heard the Spheres referenced multiple times, something about caustic hellish Mysteries being similar to Shadow’s corruptive power, some higher magic mumbo-jumbo about crystalline souls and subsumed capabilities…
“Just who are you?” she couldn’t help asking. Aurelia was very well-educated. She had been taught by the best scholars her family’s money could afford, yet the theories Janet and Sylthis were spouting like throwaway recipe tips could have stumped even the best of them.
“Hmm?”
“What’s that?”
Janet looked stunned at the interruption, while Sylthis appeared to be annoyed that she had interrupted their discourse.
“Where did you learn all that, Janet?”
“Learn what?”
Did the girl not get how absurd it was that she could theory-spar with a seasoned practitioner of magic on relatively equal footing?
“All the magic theory stuff,” she clarified. “How do you know so much about demons and their magic system, and such?” It was difficult to put into words subjects and fields that she did not comprehend.
The answer Janet provided could not have been dreamed up by a delusional psychotic. “I just fought a demon. You learn a lot from an opponent’s exchanges, you know?”
Beside her, Sylthis nodded her assent to the ridiculous statement. Their Mentor, Darius, remained out of the conversation, nose deep in his book. Did that man ever stop reading?
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“You can’t seriously expect me to believe that a short interaction with a single demon allowed you to deduce so much about its makings, origins and peculiarities.”
“Well, of course not,” she replied. “I spent most of my life reading – and I still do, copiously, to this day. Mostly about history and magic, which means I picked up a lot of tidbits about obscure magic here and there.”
Janet followed a bird that skirted past the Dead Zone’s boundary with her eyes. Shaking her head in disappointment, she continued, ”You know how once you learn about water having a melting and boiling point you instantly attributed the same qualities to every other substance in existence?”
Aurelia nodded and hummed; her attention completely captured in Janet’s explanation.
“Magic is the same way. You learn that a certain Mystery exists, and you begin to see it in work everywhere. The same for properties of mana, or the functionality of rune groups inside formations and enchantments.”
Seeing that she was beginning to lose her student, Janet backtracked. What I’m trying to say is I have a shitload of theory inside my head, which makes it easier to draw parallels and make conclusions from the observations I make regarding new magics.”
A single word rang inside Aurelia’s mind. It was one had been repeated multiple times by her parents and tutors whenever her prowess and learning capacity was brought up. “Genius.”
“Oh, no,” Janet laughed. “Not at all!”
Sylthis expounded on the self-deprecation. “Janet is actually terrible at practical magic because of all her theories. You see, when you or I encounter a spell or runic arrangement, all that is in our mind is to feed it mana and activate it. Janet’s execution gets bogged down in all the optimization and balancing out of Mysteries.”
Janet hung her head in defeat. “I’m trying to work on it, but baby steps, you know?”
So, what they were saying was that Janet was a high-tier mage trapped with the capacity of a First Circle practitioner. As the two went back to their theories, less animated this time, Aurelia couldn’t help the voice in her head that decried her newest friend’s defeatist attitude. There were worse things in life than being overly knowledgeable.
Like being the only Metal mage in a family of Nature and Bio-Affinity practitioners, for example. Brewers had little need for a metal mage, after all. No matter how talented they turned out to be.
===
Long minutes of bickering and verbal sparring went by. At one point Janet was labelled a stubborn brat, but for some reason that filled her with pride, since she replied with, “You know stubbornness is an advantageous trait. It cultivates esteem and helps build charisma. And I am of course, a brat.”
Sylthis just shook her head and admitted defeat on that front, before she doubled back on her point.
What eventually ended up happening was that the two argued for so long, their points became moot in the end.
“Ahem!” the sitting man drew their attention. “You’re all healed now, Janet.”
The declaration did not seem to catch the two by surprise. Sylthis just stooped to her knees and inspected the former wound as Janet opened her jacket and raised her shirt.
Oh, the clothes! The goddess of finery and decadent luxury had really taken a liking to the black-haired girl, and had served her some of the finest leather Aurelia had ever laid eyes on.
Rather than getting mired in her jealousy over the clothes, though, Aurelia found her jaw gaping at the image her eyes were treated to. Or rather, the profoundly conspicuous lack of a certain sight.
Janet had gulped down a vial of essence. Unless it was made out of sap from the Tree of Life, it should have been utterly useless for the purposes of injury recovery. She had also not in any way or form been exposed to healing magics, not even a scar-inhibiting salve.
Yet, Janet was fully healed. There was not a scar or blemish to be seen at the spot where if the bloody patch in her very light-colored shirt was not lying, there had been a hole wide enough to stick at least three fingers into without resistance.
“I guess this round is my loss, huh?” Sylthis asked as she ran her fingers in the completely healthy belly. Janet giggled; she was ticklish.
“What are you going on about? I was always going to heal.”
“Not that,” Sylthis looked up as Janet’s shirt fell to cover her torso. “The Mystery seems to have been integrated into your cells.”
“Really?” The smile that lit Janet’s face at Sylthis’ comment could have blinded the sun itself. “Told you I was right.”
Sylthis did not reply, opting instead to finish her once-over of Janet’s internals with her penetrating sight. Pleased with what she saw, she gave Janet a clean bill of health.
“Actually, you were wrong on that note, Janet,” Darius interjected as Janet was sitting down to claim her prize now that her mana had begun to regenerate. “Sylthis is correct in her assertion that Mysteries that cross Spheres cannot be so easily broken down and incorporated by native lifeforms. The matter that constitutes the beings from two such origins are too divergent. Their innate magics would never be compatible.”
Sylthis stated the anomaly, “Janet seems to have had no problem doing it.”
“She has a… tendency to inculcate into her most central foundations elements that hail from diverse origins and sources. I would make the claim that the absorption of the demonic Mystery is due mostly to the fact that she had already altered her innermost core by plundering from the demon’s own foundations, beforehand.” He looked deep into Janet’s eyes and stated with deadly seriousness, “If not for that, your plan would have ended up with you turning into a withered husk. It would be prudent not to take such steep risks next time.”
Janet nodded before going into meditation. She painstakingly avoided Sylthis’ line of sight in an effort to eschew the winning grin the older woman was wearing on her face.
In Aurelia’s case, she tried her best to decipher Darius’ words. Plundering foundations? Elements from all origins and sources? By the Spheres! The three had just carried out a conversation, out in the open and with zero coded words or hidden connotations, yet she had completely missed the message.
No matter, she was just a hanger-on at that point. Her cohort had gone back to the Gorge now that the ash clouds were clearing up, but the looks of hostility beamed her way had forced her to seek the company of Janet’s eccentric group.
Her goal in joining the guided expedition to the Lothrian Gorge was to gather her final 10 levels before reaching Third Circle. After sharing that ambition with Janet, she had promised that with all the hunting she had to do to restock her larder, 10 levels would be a breeze to attain. In the meantime, the trio’s company would keep her safe from her cohort’s misguided ire.
“Holy Hell!” Janet suddenly exclaimed and jumped up from her cross-legged position in a single bound. Her eyes were trained on Aurelia, probing and judging like she’d suddenly become a prized sow at auction.
“What is it now?”
“Remember when I told you I had spied a very special soul that had the most unique configuration I’d ever laid eyes on?”
Darius asked for clarification, which made Janet descend into a tale of a soul she’d found that was a metallic grey and shone with a mineral-like sheen. The important point as she stressed multiple times was that its surface was covered in chains that ran in a coordinated pattern, with circular loops running longitudinally and latitudinally across its sphere.
She described those chains as having continuous flows of energy running through them, just like planetary ley-lines.
“Don’t tell me,” Sylthis asked as she turned an interested gaze Aurelia’s way.
“Ta da!” Janet gestured with a winning smile and wide-open palms in her direction. “I found the most interesting soul in the history of the planet. Is this destiny or something?”
Darius took out a pair of golden [Scryer Goggles] and focused his sights onto her. She was quickly beginning to panic. Souls? Chains? What were the lunatics talking about now?
“Interesting…” Darius hummed as he scribbled some notes into a brand-new notebook. “Chains, you said?”
“Yep!” Janet sounded as chipper as the discoverer of a long-lost priceless treasure. “The chains look like runic links to me, but I did not get much time to look into them. The energy? Well, there’s these intermittent glows where the chains’ links intersect – yeah, at the coordinate junctions. No, I can’t infer whether or not the chains multiply as she grows. What do you mean they might be the result of an external technique? You said yourself that soul magic like that doesn’t exist!”
Aurelia hoped she’d one day get used to all the weirdness around the ladies and their teacher. For some unknown reason, Darius’ copious note-taking indicated to her that she would be spending quite some time with the group.
A normal reaction for such in-depth scrutiny would have been to feel nervous or unsettled. Instead, as her attention was drawn to Janet’s shadow that billowed like a windswept cloak as the girl grew more and more animated, Aurelia just felt a growing yearning to master her own elements to such an extent.
Every bone in her body told her that this group of eccentrics would help her attain that goal, among many others.