Everyone was gathered around the dining table for a weekly meeting. The only illumination the dining room received came from the lone light bulb that hung from the ceiling. It glowed orange, flickering occasionally as it struggled to light the room. The four present original members of the party conversed seriously while Steve tuned out entirely. He had no idea what they were talking about since he wasn’t listening, but maybe it related to something cool. Unfortunately, he was too busy thinking about hyena social structures to care enough to listen. Steve had grown significantly in the two weeks since he became a member of the Sea Men. Keith would come wake him at around 4:30 AM every morning for their ocean plunge, followed by their beach run. Afterward, they would lift weights for about an hour. Strength training turned out to be much more nuanced than he had originally believed. It was a precarious balance of training frequency, training volume, and recovery. Keith had also been forcing him to eat much more than he normally would. Something about a ‘Calorie surplus’ for ‘Optimum muscle growth’. On the other side of the coin, Rachel had started to warm up to Steve. She was slightly more talkative and less aloof. As the commanding officer of HQ, as Randal called her, Rachel was frequently busy and didn’t have time to train Steve more than three times a week. After learning to modify [Magic Missile], Rachel opted to teach Steve more fundamental aspects of magecraft. Steve opened his status out of boredom.
Steven Michael
HP: 120/120
MP: 1321/1321
Age: 20
Level: 1
XP: 0/200
Skills: Mana Control II (B), Lv. 1 Status: Dumbass
STR: 13
DEX: 12
CON: 7
Spells:
[Aura I]
[Mana Injection]
[Magic Missile]
[Shitty Dollar Store Flashlight]
Steve’s physical stats had improved noticeably. He was able to lift more and run faster for longer. Steve wondered what Keith’s stats looked like. His strength and constitution stats had to be ridiculous. He wasn’t quite sure what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses were after spending two weeks with them. He had a general idea, excluding Mateusz. The Polish man was a mystery. Keith could take a hit, and land an even strong one. Randal was ridiculously fast. Rachel mentioned something about an ability Randal had called [Windwaker], but he had no idea how it worked. Rachel was a resourceful mage with an emphasis on control and ranged attacks.
“How about we take Steve with us?” Randal asked loudly, as he leaned over the table. Steve snapped out of his stupor as he heard his name. Randal was the leader of the party, but he didn’t lead a dictatorship. He was an easy-going fellow and did his best to shrug his responsibilities onto others. Matters that concerned the team were resolved through discussion with everyone. Randal only made executive decisions when he was forced to.
“Are you sure he’s ready? He’s only been with us a few weeks,” Mateusz retorted. He and Rachel were the only voices of reason against Keith, Randal, and Steve. Keith was a meathead who liked food and alcohol to an unhealthy extent. Randal was a fun-seeking free spirit who hated logistics. Steve had a kind of chaotic child energy where he disregarded consequences and caused trouble wherever he went. In the past two weeks, he and Randal had become a common duo in Seabrook. Randal assumed an older brother role and usually led the antics. He was like the older brother Steve never had. They frequently played smash against each other, with Steve usually being victorious. Sometimes they would see who could sneak the most sand into Keith’s pockets before he noticed. Keith was the most physically optimized member of the team, meaning his mana perception was much weaker than anyone else’s. This made it much easier to sneak up on him than anyone else. Steve found out the hard way that Rachel saw everything. It was uncanny to him how she could feel him coming from four meters behind her blind spot.
“Hmm. Yeah, I don’t want him to die right away,” Randal pondered his options. Steve currently wasn’t strong enough to ‘Safely’ accompany the team on expeditions and missions. The fact of the matter was Steve was level 1 and hadn’t touched another gate since Yakima. Randal had a general notion of Steve’s potential and didn’t want to squander it.
“How about we have someone babysit him and have him get experience that way?” Keith suggested. Randal didn’t seem to mind the idea.
“How about we have him clean up some minor breaches? I think it might be a little too much to ask of a level 1 to solo clear D-tier gates, with a safety net or not,” Rachel voiced her opinion as she leaned back into her chair.
“Not a bad idea,” Mateusz noted. The Polish man had been gone frequently since Steve joined, and he only got vague answers when he pressed other members about it.
“How about this one?” Randal asked as he switched his status screen to public. A blue screen appeared in front of him, displaying a map of the West Coast of the United States. The map was covered with dots of various colors, but all the red dots were concentrated in, or near California. He pointed to a yellow dot barely inside Oregon’s northern border.
“How do you get this map?” Steve asked. He knew every inch of his status menu as a result of boredom, and a map wasn’t an option anywhere on his.
“GateOS GGWS API integration unlocks at level 3, baby,” Randal replied, spewing a string of random letters. Steve learned earlier that week that GateOS was a human creation. It was a collaboration between gods and a select handful of geniuses.
*GGWS = Global Gate Watch System
“So, how about it, Steve? You and me, monster killing date next week?” Randal suggested. Steve was itching to test his newfound skills against the scourge, so it was a welcome suggestion.
“I’m sorry, I only date tall Armenian men. No, let’s do it,” Steve agreed.
While the veterans of Steve’s team fought monsters, entered dimensional rifts, and participated in badassery, Steve was left with a lot of free time. The house had internet, but it was slow enough to be unusable. There was cell coverage too, but it barely could handle phone calls. This left Steve with no way to waste time on his phone. This gave him plenty of time for experimentation and long walks on the beach. His countless experiments resulted in countless explosions, burns, and blown fuses in the house.
Steve sat on his bed as he crafted his newest work. Clothes were scattered all over his room in a motley collage. Eggplant La Croix cans formed a pile almost knee-high in one corner of the room. It was a mess, and it was impressive given how little possessions Steve brought with him. The covers of the bed were ripped off the bed and draped over the window, leaving only bare sheets. Next to Steve on the bed was a battered college-ruled notebook. It was open to a page covered in scribbles and circular diagrams. A pile of pebbles lay in his lap. He was working on his latest attempt at his own spell. He wanted something cool to surprise Randal with on their outing in a week. Steve was able to cast [Magic Missile] fairly fast, in under five seconds, but it was clunky and generic. He didn’t feel it was flashy, or cool enough. He could make rudimentary adjustments to the trajectory of the projectile too, but that wasn’t all that impressive either.
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Standard Calyx spells had an emphasis on the four elements. The system relied heavily on the accumulated experiences and associations the average person had with them. Visualizing a death beam was much more difficult than imagining a fireball. This was one reason Standard Calyx was easier to learn, but it was one the several reasons official spells had boring names like [Fireball], and [Ice Bolt]. Steve hated how stale their names were. He was making his own spell so he could name it something awesome.
Steve was working on a spell that launched a physical projectile. He voraciously devoured the textbooks supplied by Rachel in the weeks since his arrival. While the bulk of the material wasn’t very interesting, Steve learned a thing or two here and there. The main principle behind the projectile spell he was experimenting with was called the Kovac reaction. He came across it when rereading Archmage George W. Bush’s book. The reaction could be observed anywhere and was ubiquitous with the use of magic. However, it was almost always unintentional. The sparks generated from poorly controlled spells were an example of the reaction. It was when mana reacted with the atmosphere. It was simple and was discovered way before John Kovac, but he was the first dude to write it down.
On its own, the Kovac reaction wasn’t very strong, at least under normal conditions. The single atmosphere of pressure, combined with the air’s ambient turbulence didn’t seem to aid the reaction’s usable energy output. Steve almost gave up after no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get a uniform detonation in the raw atmosphere of his room. It took about a week of obsessing, but he did figure out a repeatable method of controlling the reaction. The reaction thrived under high pressure, and its power output was dependent on the frequency of the mana supplied multiplied by the pressure. But in order to achieve high pressure, there were several prerequisites Steve had to learn. First, he needed a strong pump to force the air into a confined space. He substituted the pump with the primary driving rune structure of the first circle spell [Gust]. It was a highly versatile spell that could be altered for various scenarios relatively simply. Gust’s practical application was essentially that of a magical leaf blower. The first circle version of it wasn’t optimized for high mana volume, so the spell’s peak output wasn’t very powerful. However, that wasn’t important to Steve. Steve had spent the better part of two days memorizing and practicing forming the rune structure. Steve wasn’t looking for a spell to create a tornado, that was way beyond him. Without its accompanying runes, the air-moving rune was weak and inefficient at a human scale. After tinkering with the rune structure, he was able to optimize a high peak fluid pressure at a small scale. He only needed the rune to push a small volume of air very hard, not fast, or over a long distance.
The next stage of the spell was a container. Steve picked up a quarter-sized pebble from his lap. He had thought about using a kind of check valve system to limit the flow of air in one direction, but it proved difficult to find a practical solution to such a specific problem. The solution he came up with was in his words ‘Just wing it with magic and shit’. He was betting on the fluid pressure of his modified gust rune to be strong enough to resist the peak pressure of the compressed air inside the container. The ‘Container’ was a hemisphere created out of low-frequency compressed mana. It was at a small enough scale that he could barely manage to create the structure. Steve stared at the pebble as he concentrated. After a moment, blue tendrils began to snake and writhe into existence on the pebble, forming a small transparent blue dome. It was finally time for the first real test.
Steve’s heart began to pound in anticipation; it took over five days to get to this point. He began to form the pump rune once the container was complete. It took all the concentration Steve could muster to maintain the container’s shape while he formed the next rune. A droplet of cold sweat rolled down his cheek as he finished the pump rune and integrated it into the solid dome of mana. His hands began to quiver very slightly as he started to feed mana into the pump rune structure. The only evidence of it working was a small hiss coming from the opening he left in the dome for air intake. The runes were invisible outside of his mind’s eye, but he could imagine them. To Steve’s relief, the rune continued to pump air inside the dome without leaking. The flaw of not having a check valve was that he had to always be running the pump component to keep the air from escaping, but he worked around it by reducing the mana he allocated to the pump. Things were beginning to become dangerous as the pressure grew. Steve levitated the rock above his hand. Thank god I got [Mana Controll II]. The useless skill he was gifted as a fresh paragon turned out to be indispensable for spell crafting. The first skill a paragon was gifted greatly influenced their trajectory, and was a large source of inequality.
Steve swallowed nervously as the pebble floated above his hand. It was finally time for the final stage of the spell: mana injection. Using the very last iota of bandwidth he had left to manipulate mana, Steve formed a small ball pulsating ball of blue energy outside of the dome. The ball was about the size of a grain of rice. Small sparks jumped from the collection of energy like fleas. The higher frequency of mana carried much more energy than the baseline level that was found in most people, or in the atmosphere. With nothing left to do, Steve let the bristling blue ball of energy phase through the blue dome and react with the high-pressure air.
A deafening pop shook the room, louder than a gunshot. An explosion of blue briefly blossomed above Steve’s hand, sending a scorching wave of heat over his arm. The pebble was launched from his hand faster than the speed of sound, breaking into small fragments and embedding themselves into the far wall. Steve sat on his bed petrified at what he’d done. Once again, he had fixated on the cool part and failed to consider the consequences of his actions.
“I’m such a fucking idiot,” Steve tried to yell, but nothing came out of his mouth. He tried again with the same result. Steve realized he couldn’t hear anything. A high-pitched ringing soon filled his ears as if a swarm of mosquitoes suddenly decided to harass him. The far wall was full of tiny holes, with spots of drywall crumbling away. Flecks of paint and white dust covered the ground in front of the wall. Steve felt the ground rumble despite not being able to hear yet. It was like there was an elephant running down the hall. Keith burst through the door, wearing a look of concern on his face. The man filled the entire doorway and had to duck slightly to enter the room. Keith’s mouth opened and closed, but all Steve could hear was ringing.
“I’m fine, I just can’t hear anything,” Steve pointed at his ears. He hoped that was what came out of his mouth, but he couldn’t tell. The worry disappeared from Keith’s face, so he must’ve been close enough. Steve felt a familiar burning sensation on his hand and arm. He looked down to see blisters forming on the palm of his hand and red marks on his forearm. Shit.
“Never mind,” Steve said and held up his arm. Another magic-related injury. Steve explained what happened to Keith in the kitchen after bandaging his arm once his hearing returned.
“Mate, I was worried you got attacked by a gun-wielding monkey that somehow climbed up to your room,” Keith chuckled once he heard the story. He was surprisingly good-natured about the wall being destroyed, but it was probably because the house wasn’t his. The house was Randal’s aunt’s that he inherited. Steve was lucky all the others were out of the house and Keith was the only one home.
The spell was more of a success than a failure. Steve had successfully propelled a small pebble to Mach speeds leveraging the Kovac reaction. The experiment also revealed its lethality against foes and allies alike. He would need to refine the spell and streamline things quite a bit before it was really safe to cast around other people. Steve was suddenly greeted by several system messages.
[Your spell application has been approved]
You have created a spell sufficiently unique to qualify as a new spell.
What will you name it?
_____________
Pride and excitement welled up within Steve. GateOS officially recognized his efforts. Without hesitation, Steve used his mind to type in exactly what he wanted.
Ultra-Mach, Supersonic Judgment Beam
[Name is already taken]
Steve screamed in agony as the only thing he ever wanted was taken away from him before his eyes. Steve kicked and banged at the floor of his room, fists rattling against the loose floorboards. Bitter tears streamed down his flushed cheeks. Unfortunately, before he could say anything that would break the terms of service the chapter ended.