As I had foretold, it has been about 3 months since the last time I got a good night’s sleep, but fortunately, my previous life had trained me well in the art of operating through severe sleep deprivation, so I wasn’t making Sophia feel too guilty to join me at night. My water intake had seen a rather noticeable increase though, as I had a tendency to wake up severely dehydrated now. For the sake of survival, I ended up regularly emptying my mana pool with the enchanted water fountain I made, which on the plus side, also doubled as my regular mana training.
Sophia and I were in that awkward stage where we were practically a couple, yet neither of us made the first move to officially become one. We’ve still only known each other for a very short time after all, and I think we both had the understanding that once something happened, between my various issues and demon’s psychology, it would be setting us on a certain path for life. Before that happened, we both needed to be 100% ready to deal with the consequences of that inevitable circumstance, so for now, it was just awkward friends and cuddle buddies.
During this period of time, I had hunted several beasts and stored them in a freezer, so that Sophia and I could eat something different every night, and have the leftovers for breakfast and lunch. Using my flying knives like drones so much had actually also given me the answer to the problem of how to manage mana so that I could train it while also having a ‘just in case fund’. Batteries. Rather than save an unspecified portion of mana without touching it, I would find a way to enchant something that could store mana for me in advance, and have my other enchanted tools draw power from that extra store.
Once I had the idea, it was very simple to implement. I took my knife with both the wing and eye enchantments, and off to the side, I carved the shape of a battery, with a + at the top and a - at the bottom, then carved a simple circuit leading from one side of the battery, connecting to the two enchantments, then into an off/on switch, and finally to the other side of the battery. I then spent the next few weeks testing how well it could hold a charge, and how bad the mana leakage was when not using the knife. I found that the rate of mana drain was directly proportional to how much mana I had stuffed into the battery. If it was at a maximum charge, then it would lose about 1% every hour until it hit around 75%, then it would slow down to about 1% every half day until around 60%ish. So roughly one day without use would take it from 100%-75%, one week after that would take it from 75%-60%, and a month after that would drop it from 60%-50%. Not bad considering a full charge takes about 5 hours but lasts for 12. The only problem is that I have to completely focus on charging it for those full 5 hours, and can’t do it passively while I walk around.
Naturally once I had the batteries all flushed out I spent a good while carving them into every piece of equipment I had. The switch design allowed me to choose whether I would use them normally, treating myself as the source of power, or switch the source of power over to the battery, which would only power whatever enchantments I connected the circuit to.
Charging the batteries had also taught me an interesting fact about mana. The reason I could charge the batteries far faster than I could fill my own mana pool was that the batteries accepted atmospheric or natural mana, whereas I didn’t. Somehow, in the process of becoming ‘my mana’, atmospheric mana underwent something like a frequency attunement, which I hypothesized had something to do with my soul. This became the limiting factor in how fast I could regenerate mana. I had to wonder if my soul was also like a mana battery, similar to my enchantments, but just ran on a specialized frequency. If so, did that mean I had similar mana circuits as well? And if so, how optimally was I utilizing them? Unfortunately, in order to find out any of these, I would have to be able to thoroughly examine my own soul, a stage of power that Sophia claimed had taken her millenia to reach.
Now that I didn’t have to worry about sparing a certain level of mana and could just blast it out like I did originally, Sophia had started teaching me the basics of demon magic. Demon magic was interesting in that it indirectly touched the soul through the concepts of emotions. And while she had worried that my emotional color blindness would make things more difficult for me, it seemed that magic was somewhat forgiving with its definitions of emotion. As far as magic was concerned, there were two main alignments a being could have: Existence, and Non-Existence. From what Sophia had heard, angels were beings primarily aligned with non-existence. They practiced qualities such as temperance, patience, and humility, attempting to basically dissolve themselves into the world around them, and become one with the universe. Demons on the other hand, were much more self-absorbed. They were firmly aligned with existence, and practiced qualities such as wrath, lust, and pride, essentially thrusting themselves into the universe and proclaiming, “I am here”, with little to no regard for the world around them.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
So in short, perhaps emotion was the wrong word to describe the core of demonic magic. A slightly more accurate term would be ‘proof of Existence’. As long as you possessed a sense of being, any sort of feeling of presence, you would be able to impose that on another. The key was to submerge yourself into your memories of the times you felt a specific way, then fully embrace that emotion, and through eye contact, use mana to directly send it to another person in a kind of mental attack. Practicing this spell is how I would be spending the next three months of travel.
Sophia’s POV
The first time Leo succeeded at Evil Eye, as he passionately referred to it, gave me nightmares for a week. Given the state of the blankets in the morning, I’m fairly certain I thrashed around at night, waking him up in the process. Although, that could also have been him just being hot and throwing them to the side in the middle of the night. While he was doing an excellent job of pretending that my presence in his bed gave him no difficulties, I had long noticed Leo’s dramatic increase in water consumption, and the tired black rings under his eyes. A large part of me felt guilty for interfering with his sleep, but my heart was warmed with how adamantly he denied all such accusations, claiming that he slept better than ever with a beautiful girl beside him. It made me feel…wanted. In a way I haven’t felt in millenia. How oddly satisfying. Though Veronica simply accused us both of simply being horny and in denial. Needless to say I ignored her input.
When Leo had first attempted the evil eye, he fell into a common trap. When he picked his memory, he had focused too hard on the purity of the emotion felt. He had attempted to infuse me with wrath, and while he had several far more intense experiences with the feeling, all of those had several other emotions infused into the memory, and the only times he could remember feeling only wrath specifically, were the times he had faced mildly annoying coworkers. After I had him explain his thought process to locate the root of this problem, I explained the spell to him differently.
“Rather than focusing on one specific emotion and finding the memory that best triggers it in you, you should be trying to look for your most intense memory. It doesn’t matter how many other feelings you have ‘polluting the waters’, the primary concern is intensity for this spell. Remember, this is the most basic of mental attacks, throw subtlety out the window. As you practice more and more, you will be able to build the subtle control and specifically target certain emotions to create the sinister kind of spell you’re trying for, but for now? Intensity is key.”
On one hand, I’m actually rather proud of him for getting it so fast after that. On the other hand, what happened next I was in no way suited to handle. Under his breath I heard a chant, a whisper, a silent terrible scream. I don’t even think he registered that he had said it aloud, and was just allowing his thoughts to sink into one of the worst moments of his life.
“Try harder next time.”
Thump.
My pulse rose to a deafening level in my head, before growing still. Cold. I felt something crack in the pit of my stomach, opening an abyss into which all of my organs fell. My thoughts grew hazier and hazier until I wasn’t even sure if I was still conscious, only I definitely was, because the world around me was thrown into a stark clarity. I saw everything around me, heard everything, but could process none of it. I felt like I was drowning, powerless, isolated in the depths of a vast ocean, looking up through the suffocating darkness to see the face of pure madness, sitting on the edge of the abyss, preparing to jump in, and make sure my head stayed under. I was sinking….Sinking….
Until I wasn’t anymore. Until the world died down around me, and the subspace was filled with a heavy silence. I hadn’t even realized the spell was over until I saw Leo collapsing in front of me. Even then, it took me a solid minute or two to gain my bearings enough to carry him to his…our bed. I laid him down and stared off into the distance of the subspace, thinking about what it was I had just experienced.
The chant before the spell had hit, “Try harder next time”...If I remembered correctly, those were the words his mother had spoken to him. I was a 5000 year old demon, and I had only been under the spell for a few seconds, yet was nearly sent to the edge, but Leo… Leo had lived through that despite being just a powerless human for years. How the fuck could he still smile? How could he still treat me like I was someone important to him, someone whom he had to protect? And what kind of mother could do that to her own son? Did she even know? Was she aware of just how horribly she had broken this boy in front of me?
I hadn’t joined him to sleep that night and instead sat on the bed, stroking Leo’s head, and thinking about questions I would never know the answer to.