CHAPTER 36: CAGED MAGIC
Ten minutes later Hiro was frustrated and pacing around the cage of stone and wire. She had poked and prodded the cage both physically and magically. She had even backed up into the sky and shot an arrow of light at it for nothing to happen.
She ran her hand along the invisible barrier that prevented her from getting to the slowly blinking mana within. She pulled up the unsolicited quest again hoping for some insight.
* Quest: Discover the secrets of the caged pedestal.
With an exasperated sigh, she spoke to Button, "I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for here. I feel the lines of mana running through it. I even saw them light up when I hit it with an arrow, but other than it being a barrier I don't know much more than I did before."
"You have acquired quite a bit of data Miss, know what can you do with that?" Button asked cheerfully gaining an eyeroll from Hiro.
"Let's see here," Hiro conjured a small knife out of light mana. She was pleased to see the new ability tick up another percent. It had been defined when she shot her first arrow from it. She looked at the ability in her HUD.
> Light Ability- Conjure Weapons
>
> Novice 8>9%
A lopsided smile quirked the corner of her mouth at making some kind of progress as she struck out at a gap between the wires. The tip of the light dagger stopped at an invisible barrier and light cascaded across the surface of the dome surrounding the pedestal. She watched as an intricate web of lines spread from her strike. The lines ran like longitude and latitude lines on a globe. Slowly the lines faded from her vision.
"The lines are ordered, making me think they are made by someone not naturally formed. Hmm, I wonder if they go underground and make a sphere. Maybe I can go through the floor." Hiro pulled her dagger of light from the dome and the light show slowly faded.
She crouched down and struck again. Light flowed in waves from the impact point. She felt the power radiate down and into the ground. The cage was a sphere, not a dome. A flash under her boots prompted her to inspect the ground. She brushed away a thick layer of dust and dirt from the stone pavers revealing the same lines of magic radiating from the cage.
"Huh, I wonder what these are for," Hiro muttered. She lifted herself into the air and flew over to the forest around the central pedestal. The moisture in the air had put her in mind of a greenhouse when she first entered. Now she needed some of that water.
Reaching out like Moria had shown the first day they met. Hiro focused on the water molecules in the air. She pulled them toward herself. Immediately fog rose from the surrounding jungle and engulfed her in a fluffy cloud of water vapor. She laughed at the ease of it, and a water droplet icon appeared on her Hud. Ignoring it for a moment she reached out to the fog bank and this time she pushed it together, condensing it into a liquid blob, concentrating to hold it in front of her.
An undulating beachball-sized blob of water hovered in front of her. She pulled up the blinking icon a smile stretched wide on her face.
> New Ability Defined!
> Water Ability- Control Water
>
> Novice 67%
"Wow! I know I had a head start with that one, but 67%? I'll take it!"
"You have a knack for water control Miss." Button said simply.
Hiro took a second to have Buton pin the new ability to the top of her HUD to keep an eye on it. She had a plan and wanted to know what would happen to the percentage when she carried it out.
She floated back to the platform of stone and concentrated. She wanted to make a stream of water from the globe and she wanted it at a fairly high pressure. She formed a stream of water and pushed it at the stone. It splashed weakly against it making mud but not blasting away the grime like the power washer she envisioned. Her brow creased as she pulled some more moisture in from the environment. Her control water ability did not move.
She sighed, of course, if she wanted to add pressure, she needed control, she didn't have a metal nozzle and a compressor to help. She pulled her legs up and crossed them, pushing a bit of cloud under herself and infusing some hardened light into it to make a seat.
> New Ability Defined!
> Confluence Light/Water/Sky Ability- Cloud Constructs
>
> Novice 35%
"Huh! Neat! First 3 way!" She chuckled, settled herself into the comfortable cloud seat she had pined in the sky, and focused on her blob of water. She had to use mana to force it to shoot faster. She had to figure out how to narrow the end of her mana to create a nozzle and then apply pressure to get it to shoot out.
She tried several things, focusing her magi on one side causing the water to pour out of the other when she stopped concentrating on it. She was finally able to split her attention enough to do both and then she pushed on the blob and it exploded in a shower of droplets. She sputtered then laughed, reaching out to wick the water away from her and back into a ball. She glanced at the pined ability
> Water Ability- Control Water
>
> Novice 67>69%
"Nice," she whispered before refocusing on the task at hand. It took another 23 minutes before she had her first breakthrough that didn't result in an explosion of water. A stream of water with the power of a squirt gun streamed out and splashed against the ground making a line in the mud. She pumped her fist success!
Only a few minutes later she adjusted the net of pressure she used to push on the blob and refined the nozzle to make a stream of water forceful enough to blast the grime off the stone pavers below. She began to make a slow loop around. She could've sloshed water over it and scrubbed it away, but that would've been too easy, she wanted to test her limits.
She was sweating and the sheer amount of concentration involved in maintaining all the magic she was putting out made her head hurt. She had plenty of magic to spare, but levitating while pushing a cloud construct around and doing complex water manipulation was a lot to focus on at once. She didn't mind however, this was the coolest thing she had ever done and it was just magical cleaning.
It was super satisfying to clean the stone. She did notice that none of the water could pass through the barrier. Cycling the water out of the mud and dirt leaving it behind and giving her clean water to continue her task, she made short work of her cleaning project and revealed a wetly shining stone ring around the cage.
> Water Ability- Control Water
>
> Novice 69>86%
A satisfied smile stretched across her face before she unpinned the ability from her vision. Back to figuring out the mystery of the caded pedestal of magic. There were no lines on the stones, they were smooth apart from the seams between the large pavers. Hiro stood on her cloud and pulled her bow off her back. She froze time with barely a thought and shot 3 arrows at once. Each arrow of light left her bowstring and then froze along with everything else before she conjured and shot the next.
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When she unpasued time, the 3 arrows sprang forth and dug into the base of the cage. They slowly sunk into the cage barrier like candles burning out spreading their light across the lines of power. Now that the pavers were clean she could see the lines circle the sphere in clean arcs and straight lines radiating from the center. A few of them converged building together to make one thick line stretching out and leading away from the cage in a straight line before it disappeared into the underbrush.
> New Ability Defined!
> Confluence Light/Accuracy Ability- Multishot
>
> Novice 2%
Hiro quirked an eyebrow at the new ability defined and the low percentage. She mentally added 'Time' to 'Light/Accuracy' before asking a question. "Is the 2% because I have only shot stationary things?"
"Indeed Miss, very astute," Button replied.
"Now don't go praising me Button, I might start thinking I actually know what's going on, and we both know that's not true."
"Don't worry Miss, you'll figure it all out soon enough," Button replied
"Well, what do you make of these mana lines? Anything I should know about what the heck all of this is?" Hiro asked.
"Likes like this usually mean some sort of large array for an enchantment or ritual. Essentially, magic is put into place for a lasting effect and maintained with power from mana batteries or environmental power. If you can't see the lines, one of two things is happening, they are hidden or they are unpowered. Since they flair when you add power, that suggests the second option is more likely." He continued before Hiro could ask her next question, "I have insufficient data to determine what this array is for."
"Hmm, so this array is for a large-scale magical effect and we cannot determine what it is without more information. I suppose I could power it up and see. Or follow the lines and see if there is a control point or something around the city to determine its effect.
"Indeed, I have also intercepted another notification about the external quest, would you like to see it?" Button asked.
Hiro frowned at the news, at least Button was able to intercept it, "Good work catching it, but yes, please show me."
* Quest: Discover the secrets of the caged pedestal.
* Quest Progress:
* You have discovered that the pedestal is in the center of a magical array.
* New Auxiliary Quest: Uncover what the array does.
* New Auxiliary Quest: Power or destroy the magical array
"Well the feedback on that I'm on the right track is nice I suppose." She took a deep breath, Keep monitoring it please Button."
"I will do so Miss Skylark," Button replied.
Hiro nodded at his response before lapsing into quiet contemplation. She looked up at the sky. One of the two yellow suns peered down at her through the broken dome. It had not appeared to move much in the time she was here. It was hard to determine what time of day it was in a world with 2 suns and no context for how long the days were, but she had been in the Anomaly for fifty-seven minutes at this point.
So far nothing was timed and there were no threats. She suspected that the testing would start as soon as she started investigating the array and cage. Hiro's head tilted to the side as she considered what the tests might look like. Combat for sure, but what else? Maybe her critical thinking? Well, that's fine, she loved figuring things out.
She rose above the enclosed canopy and shot more arrows at the base of the spherical cage. They flared mana through the array's channels. "Button draw the mana lines in an overlay for me as I light them up."
He didn't reply but a network of thin blue lines appeared in her vision. She moved around shooting light arrows until the entire ring around the sphere was mapped onto her vision. She rose up higher looking down at the whole picture of the area directly surrounding the sphere. Several rings of incomplete circles at odd intervals were connected by lines streaming straight from the central pedestal. Some of those lines were broken.
It reminded Hiro of when someone looks straight down at the top of a globe. However, parts of the lines were erased and some of the lines jumped side to side instead of staying exactly with longitude and latitude lines. "It's almost like your strange spiral alphabet Button."
"Similar, but it doesn't register on any of my language scans. However, it is common to use parts of written language in arrays. Without access to the network I do not have access to deeper analytical tools I'm afraid." Button informed her.
"Yeah yeah, that's fine." She waved her hand at his words, then traced the converging lines until she saw two massive lines heading in opposite directions. Several thinner and smaller lines also headed from the central array but only two looked like they were designed to handle large amounts of power.
"I wonder," she whispered before calling up her power over Accuracy. It helped her manage her mana and channels inside her, it would probably allow her to see something interesting here too right?
Indeed as soon as she pushed some of her magic to her eyes several areas of the array lit up in front of her. A rainbow of colors had spread across her vision. In the cavern, red colors had been places to land hits, and yellow had been weak points. But this felt different, the colors had more emotions in them. She could tell something had changed when Accuracy had combined into the light core. She would have to see if her combat vision still displaced the same colors as before, but when looking at magical constructs everything felt different.
The entire sphere was a deep russet brown. Deep in her gut, where her center was, she knew this meant it would be ineffectual or impossible to do anything with it. but the red in the brown meant it was important. The smallest lines glowed a sleepy purple, she inferred she could do something with them, but it wasn't important.
One of the major lines glowed a cyan blue and the other a lime green. Her gut told her these were the lines she needed to power or destroy to have the greatest effect. This had been her hunch, but now her magic confirmed it. An icon popped up and blinked in the corner of her vision. She'd get to it in a minute. She approached the green line and shot some more arrows down the line. Button obligingly added to the overlay but the dense foliage prevented her from tracking it more than a few meters into the forest from above.
She wrinkled her nose. She liked hiking the prairies of her home, but tracking through a densely packed forest did not sound appealing. She didn't even have a machete or something to cut through the underbrush! She gestured in frustration at the dense growth and a white web of scars along her hands and forearms flashed in the light.
"Idiot." She shook her head at herself gently knocking her fist as the absurdity of her situation sank in.
"You or me Miss?" Button asked, "Because I think you're doing wonderfully, and if I am doing poorly please instruct me on how to be a better assistant."
Hiro just shook her hand and conjured a long blade into her hand. The bow disappeared from her hand. "Me Button. I'm literally hovering in the sky and have scars from lightning I can shoot from my hands. I was hesitating about going into the forest to find where that line goes and I was worried about hiking through the underbrush." She sighed, "It would've been so hard to hike through untamed forests on Earth, but I can conjure weapons and anything else I need!"
"That doesn't make you an idiot Miss. You have only had Magical powers for about a week in Earth's time, and this is the first time you can truly explore them without worry. Give it time and you will grow into an exemplary Spark." Button's voice held so much conviction it pulled Hiro up short.
A mix of emotions welled up inside her. Guilt rose from frying him in the caverns, appreciation at his help, and wonder at his increased capabilities even when away from the network vied to be at the forefront of her mind. "Thank you Button."
"You're welcome, Miss."
"Let me see what you named this new ability and then let's explore," she said swooshing the sword clumsily through the air.
> New Ability Defined!
> Confluence Light/Accuracy Ability- Mana Sight
>
> Novice 19%
Confused Hiro toggled off the overlay she assumed she had been lighting as she used her accuracy and light concept. The array was still glowing in her vision without the overlay. She stopped pulling mana into her eyes and the array slowly faded from her vision.
"Now that's awesome!" She flew down to the base of the sphere and touched down next to the bold green line of power. "Just follow the yellow brick road, Toto."
"I'm reading that line as Green, and I thought you named me Button."
"When we get back, I'm going to see if we can't download the Wizard of Oz and commit it to your memory banks Button." She let out a fake long-suffering sigh, "Let's go Button, I'll tell you a tale of witches and flying monkeys as we walk."