For months, many times a week, Alice trained her magic and her casting speed with Serena.
All this training had paid off because she now wasted significantly less mana than before with her energy conversions. If she had to make an estimation, only 5% of the mana was now turned into heat loss.
At some point, Alice had managed to create much more complex spells than just an assisted conversion or a delayed magic activation: she had developed what she liked to call a mana armor. This elaborate spell was doing three different things.
First, it autonomously controlled and displaced Alice's mana to perfectly match her movements as she walked. When she “wore" this armor, it was of course invisible.
The second thing it did was a conversion of her liking, to protect her from something. The most obvious threat was a physical attack, so her default conversion was a kinetic-to-mana one.
The last aspect of this spell was a special activation. It varied depending on the kind of threat the armor was supposed to protect Alice from. In the kinetic version of the spell, it activated when motion was detected through the veil of mana.
The implementation of this spell had been quite a bit harder than with the simpler ones. For weeks, Serena had forced Alice to manually create the mana armor all day to get used to it. This meant she had to make her mana perfectly marry the shape of her body even when she was walking or running: this task had been mentally taxing for Alice. While the conversion itself was pretty easy thanks to the already existing spells, she still had to constantly verify if there was any physical threat so that it could really be called an armor protecting her at any time. As such, it was tricky, because it could activate if Alice messed up in making the mana move with her and instead passed through the mana herself.
Since just doing it manually for weeks was not enough, Alice had angrily searched for a way to make her brain, magic type, spirit, or whatever understand what she wanted to create. Frankly, a mere human getting upset for not managing to create such a complex spell in only a few weeks was so unreasonable that an elf might have gotten away with murdering her. Even Alice would have forgiven them in heaven or her next life.
At some point, both in her mind and on paper, she had decided to formalize her element and all her spells as one big computer program. Indeed, as she got used to simpler spells that could make her mana turn into magic with a delay or with a certain trigger that she could specify, it really felt like different implementations of an already existing function. Though it used a combination of breathing and micromovements of her arms and hands instead of regular code.
So, she tried seeing her control of energy as some library that she was importing into her program and that already had some existing functions, and she began creating a new one.
In a loop that started at the spell’s activation, all it had to do was periodically check if something was up at the surface of the mana.
If that wasn’t the case, there was nothing to do besides displacing the mana to actualize its position. Just this one step was actually pretty complex, however, so manually creating this armor for some time had probably helped.
If something was occurring where the veil was, a conversion specified in advance was performed and the mana’s position around the body was actualized.
She even included an automatic reabsorption feature for the mana generated by the armor.
This simple way of understanding and formalizing spells was of course not from this world. Even though she majored in physics, Alice’s former self had still gone through some hellish software development training, mainly to create physics simulations for college projects. As such, Alice inherited those skills and used them to find a new way of envisioning magic. Perhaps this specific approach was the key to Alice's ability to create all her spells. This was a concise and optimized way of describing the fusion and automation of multiple complex mana operations.
While the kinetic-to-mana conversion was the default version of the armor, soberly called ‘Mana armor: kinetic style’, Alice had created a variant: the ‘Mana armor: photon style’. As its name suggested, it applied a light-to-mana conversion to every ray of light directed at her.
Since the speed of light was ever-so-slightly faster than regular kinetic weapons, Alice did not bother verifying at each iteration if some light was passing through her veil of mana. Instead, her spell was casting the conversion constantly so that all the photons from Hiphus that were traversing the barrier would lose some energy.
If someone was aware of what Alice was doing and paid attention, they might see that the light reflected on her was slightly shifted towards the color red. After all, for an observer, the light passed through the ‘photon style’ armor twice and lost both times a certain quantity of energy as a result. If she greatly increased the density of the mana in the armor, she could even shift the light into the infrared, making her look like a living shadow. Since the light entering Alice’s eyes passed the mana barrier only once, she would still be able to see a bit of the outside world somewhat.
Because it was constantly casting a light-to-mana conversion, the ‘photon style’ consumed more mana than the ‘kinetic style’. Still, the former was at least generating mana at all times. With the latter, however, Alice had to actually be hit by something to get mana.
All in all, depending on the mana density of the armor, the light version could overcome the cost of the spell and actually increase Alice’s mana as a result, while taking a punch every ten seconds or so would hardly exceed the cost of the spell in the case of the kinetic version.
Therefore, to achieve a kinetic protection that was perfectly balanced with the cost of the spell, Alice had to fuse the photon and kinetic armors together.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
However, even with a costly kinetic armor, it was not that much of a deal. After all, if she really lacked mana, she now had a way to get it back.
Indeed, Alice had just created another spell that was optimized for fast mana recovery, and she was about to show it for the first time to Serena, her practical instructor.
Alice currently had only a tenth of her mana pool remaining.
“Uh… You said it’s supposed to be a large-scale spell, right? Can you really cast it with this much mana left?”
“Hehehe. Open wide your magic eye and see for yourself.”
(‘Ortu Solis’!)
Alice summoned a layer of mana shaped in the form of a big panel. It had a surface of four square meters and a thickness between ten and twenty centimeters.
“Your mana manipulation is quite precise considering the distance.”
“The spell is already cast. It shaped itself.”
“What? Really?”
Serena was intrigued, so she silently watched this so-called “large-scale” spell. For now, it wasn’t that large.
The mana panel moved up, without Alice making any movement with her hands or even changing her way of breathing. The mana truly was moving by itself.
Then, the panel oriented itself towards Hiphus, the star of this solar system.
Immediately after, the mana started converting something, most likely light. Even without her mana lens, Serena could see the volume of air occupied by the invisible panel darkening.
The mana generated by the four square meters panel was aggregated into a smaller mana panel next to the bigger one, this time of about two square meters.
After ten seconds, the small panel darkened: its mana density was now enough to sustain itself and start generating its own mana. This process repeated itself for some time.
The four square meter panel’s only purpose seemed to be to increase the overall surface of the spell, thus accelerating the overall mana generation, while the smaller two square meter panels were made to directly recover Alice's mana. A continuous flow of mana was slowly making its way to her.
After a little more than three minutes, a gigantic black mass with an area of about forty square meters that did not let any visible light pass through was deployed a few meters above Alice and Serena. Even though this thing looked devoid of any warmth, it was actually emitting a lot of heat from the constant conversions occurring up there. Another layer of mana was recycling this heat to partially cover the cost of this spell, increasing even further the efficiency of each individual panel.
“This is getting scary… How long before your mana pool is fully recovered?”
“Oh, it’s been replenished for quite some time already. By now, it would have easily charged up a royal’s mana pool, I think. Maybe even two.”
“Eh?!”
“Why are you so surprised? I told you it was a large-scale spell optimized for fast mana recovery…”
“... I might really kidnap you to make me mana potions after all.”
“Surely you are joking, right?!”
“Mmh? Y-yeah, of course I am! Hahaha!”
(She obviously was not though?! Her eyes were so devoid of emotion!)
“You really are something though. I mean, I told you already recovering all your mana in an hour was so astounding that any powerful noble would kidnap you, and there you are showing me this.”
“Well it was mostly your idea, so I thought I would be grateful enough to show you this.”
“If you really want to show me your gratitude, be useful and help me make potions! With my refraction magic and your energy magic, we would be the best potion-makers in the kingdom - perhaps even in the world! Wait. With this much mana output, we would not even have to carefully follow the mana flow for efficiency… Even with nineteen out of twenty units of mana being lost in the neutralization, it would not be a big deal…!”
Serena was gazing at the black panel as she was mumbling about the both of them revolutionizing this industry of mana potions.
“How many times do I have to decline?”
“At the very least a million more times.”
“Well, I refuse.”
“I will need a lot more refusals than that.”
“You will surely give up before me. How long do you plan to be my instructor, anyway? Should you not train other people for a change?”
“Don’t casually try getting rid of me! Please!! I will not ask you to be my assistant for a whole month, I swear!”
“What does Viktor have to say about your being so far away from the capital all the time? Is he not letting you temporarily live in one of his residences?”
“I have all his support to stay here for a few more years. He simply loves my reports on your magic.”
“A few more years?! I cannot let that happen when the Vallmonts are paying for me!”
“Oh, they stopped paying me three months ago already.”
“What? Why are you here then?!”
“Now it’s me who wonders why you’re so surprised… I just said that Master Viktor gives me his full support. Financially, that is.”
“Why?!”
“It’s called investment. Last week, he even suggested buying me a house around here and my own carriage.”
“W-wait a minute, what does he want me to do for him in the future?!”
“Even I don’t know. But I am certain he’s expecting great things from you.”
“Just so you know, I do not want to stand out in the noble society. To the world, I am just a regular strengthening mage…”
Serena looked once again at this enormous structure that was probably the darkest thing in the world. Alice sure was bold to pretend to be a pseudo-strengthening mage despite having created something of this caliber.
“Alright, I think I will end this trial run. It went surprisingly well.”
Alice merely snapped her fingers and all the black panels returned to regular mana as every light-to-mana conversion stopped. Alice mumbled a word in a language Serena did not understand and she directed her index finger toward the sky. All the mana seemed to combine and move up as one block before slowly being converted into heat directed toward the sky. At this height and since the heat wasn’t released in one go, the few megajoules didn’t hurt anyone.
With that, the lesson ended. In those few months, Alice had barely grown, so her mana pool was not particularly different from before. To optimize her use of mana, the only thing she could do for now was to make her spells even more mana-efficient.
Since most of her uses of magic consisted of complex and automatic spells, Alice did not have to constantly avoid thinking about annihilation, so it eased her mind quite a lot.
She was no longer afraid of her magic and was now always trying to come up with new ideas for spells based on both science and games. If she used her energy manipulation abilities correctly, she was sure she could emulate numerous magic types.