The sound of a gunshot was easily noticeable from some distance, the trees and vegetation did a good job halting its spread but it was still quite loud. This was the sound of pebbles hitting the boulder that Gilliam managed to throw a short distance before, he was picking them up with his magic and with both a physical and magical thrust they were sent flying with tremendous speed. Though his aiming was absolutely not perfect at the moment, he still aimed for the boulder in the distance, when it hit the pebble would explode into fragments and dust.
He quickly found out that the more energy put behind the thrust the faster it would go, which made sense if you compared it to muscles and throwing, the harder you throw, as in the more energy you put in your muscles, the faster and further it would go. The few shots he sent flying with massive energy behind them broke the sound barrier, adding a second snap to the event.
Gilliam couldn’t do anything about the large grin on his face, as the saying goes; had it not been for his ears it would have gone all the way around. A physical impossibility but does wonders to explain the visual side of it.
Angela had rushed over to check out what the unnatural sound was, but after a simple explanation from Gilliam, both to what he was doing but also the physics behind breaking the sound barrier, she was confused about the explanation but let him continue, going back to her own thing.
Though he was having the time of his life, he had to take breaks, he was absolutely overdoing the power he put into those spells, he genuinely liked the idea that he could send things flying at supersonic speeds. Though, if Angela was correct he had an abnormally large mana pool, so this might not be a common thing. The book also mentioned that these spells were unstructured, whatever that meant, it didn’t explain it at all but it did state that they were inefficient. Perhaps a structured spell somehow streamlined the spell... to make it use less mana.. Somehow? He really didn’t know, but if this was what he could do with an inefficient spell then he was really looking forward to playing with it optimised.
Having lost track of time a long time ago, he swapped through the elements. The book didn’t detail much about Light or Dark magic, the little test-spell was the only proper information about them in the book. It touched on that Light spells were healing and restorative in nature, and though you’d think that Dark spells were the opposite, that was not the case. There was mention that it dealt with life energy but also that it had stranger applications.
The most interesting to Gilliam was the Aether chapters, nothing was properly explained in this book besides the very introductory things, but Aether was the so called ‘non element’. It was a fundamental element like the others, sometimes considered ‘the element of energy’. For some reason it had the least amount of attack focused magic but was the most versatile of them all. At least according to the book, which was a bit hard to properly understand without actually explaining anything.
For now, Gilliam took this at face value, he was going to learn more later, so he continued to test out things with the various elements, testing the power difference between a little and a lot of energy pumped into it.
He didn’t do this kind of testing with Fire, Light and Dark, simply due to lack of understanding and control he didn’t want to burn down the whole jungle.
His testing and playing was suddenly cut short by another echoing sound in the jungle, his stomach growled with the force of an angry boar. Clearly all this mana usage and regeneration ate through his body’s energy like there was no tomorrow. He needed sustenance!
“Shame I can’t just create food...” he muttered to himself as he picked up the book before heading back to Angela’s hut.
As he got back there, he saw her training in her own form. She was standing in an incredibly wide stance and doing some breathing... He had no proper idea what she was doing but it looked very martial-artist’y, for the lack of a better word.
Opening his mouth to ask about food his stomach decided to announce the situation with less words, breaking her concentration with a growl.
Though she was clearly a little annoyed that her focus was broken she couldn’t really do more than chuckle.
“You have learned one of the drawbacks of magic; food” as she got into a more common standing position her voice carried a fake sagely tone, though fake in sage-tone it was clear that she knew about the statement from experience.
Gilliam nodded. “I had no idea it was going to be this bad... I mean... If I look at it logically the body needs and uses energy but.” He patted his stomach as he explained, hinting that they ate about an, what was it, two hours ago or something?
That dense bread and piece of meat should have kept him going for at least a few hours of normal work. Clearly having a large mana pool was neat and cool, but replenishing it apparently needed energy in its own form.
“Well, we’re leaving this place in a few days at the most, might as well eat the food we’re not going to bring.” she smiled, seeming honestly happy about leaving.
“What about the books and the building itself?” Gilliam looked a bit hesitant, they were leaving because he was here, so he felt a tiny bit guilty.
“That’s no problem, Geof can handle that. Though he’s insistent on certain things I’m not interested in, we had a deal long before you landed” she smiled.
Given the way she opened the door only a few hours ago when he knocked, shouting something about Geof, they clearly knew each other.
Not knowing the details Gilliam still guessed that men are men and this was probably something with some intimate goals... It usually is for most.
“Oh, that’s good, then. I still can’t say I’m fond of the thought that I’m that important in your life that you’ll just abandon your home for someone you don’t know...” again the guilt was clear and heavy.
“Don’t worry about it-” she started as she got back into her wide stance. “-I’m doing this for selfish reasons as well. So it’s not only you”
Though it was toned as a joke there were some hints of facial quirks in there which hinted to this being true but that there was more to it.
“Just go eat, we’ll leave when we’re out of food or you feel ready.” nodding towards the open door during her explanation she returned to her breathing exercises.
Gilliam didn’t want to interrupt her more than he already has, he sort of opened his mouth to speak but, she seemed to prefer focus at this point:
Going into this friendly stranger’s house he felt... out of place. Not just physically or metaphorically but he was given so much by this person, by Angela, without really giving anything back.
Now he’s entering her house and is told to just eat her food... He didn’t feel comfortable with this but, his stomach had other plans and weren’t going to take no for an answer.
Getting some more bread and meat from the box she got them from earlier and started scarfing it down. It was somewhat bland but not too bad, like before he couldn’t do much but comparing it to the whole grain and slightly more expensive breads back home. Interesting that in this world odds were higher that what he considered normal was probably expensive if available at all. Modern society was really spoiling people if you properly analysed it.
The food disappeared faster than expected, being deep in thought as he ate didn’t really help realising just how fast he was eating it. Chasing it with a large mug.. Cup.. thing, of water had him feeling somewhat satisfied. Not the same as a proper dinner back home but it was plenty.
Getting a proper look around in the building he first now got a chance to properly take a look, the first time there was so much explanation and just everything at once, so he didn’t get the moment to take it all in.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The building was very simple, as he noticed from the outside when he first arrived it was made up from the jungle, it was basically a small log-cabin of sorts. The gaps are filled with mud and smaller bits of wood, the roof seemed to have a simple wooden support structure but was covered in bundles of leaves. The flooring was just many smaller branches tied together into a sort of stick-mat, making a surprisingly stable platform. There were tooling marks at the end of most of the larger logs so if she made it herself she would most likely have used at least some tools.
Even the furniture was made from local materials, all in all it was a rather cosy log-cabin with homemade furniture. This would have cost a fortune back home, but here it just seemed to be something she might have done to pass the time as she waited for him.
As he was analysing her craftsmanship he started checking out the stacks of books that she had prepared. All from history, to magic, to politics to maps... She was incredibly prepared and, to think she would open a few to show him things and he would use one of them. It almost felt a bit wasteful. The map was interesting, it wasn’t too detailed but rather simplistic. There were some upside down V’s that were bunched together for mountains, simple streams and rivers, it all looked something simple one could make with a pen, or quill in this case.
Not knowing the economy of this world, he knew that maps tended to be expensive in the past, so this is probably a cheaper one she got for the explanations sake. She really put effort and time into this.
He started feeling a bit worse about the situation, on one hand he was absolutely stoked about becoming powerful, about using actual magic. He always loved magic from games, stories and media back home, so this was literally a dream come true. But he didn’t feel comfortable with how much of her world revolved around him, it was oddly nice in one way but it was a daunting thing to live up to.
Thinking back to her determination to not be left behind, he decided to himself that he wouldn’t let himself fall behind either. Not only is this fun and interesting but if she is going to follow him around he would have to become someone worthy of following!
And, as she said, worst case scenario if enough of what she said weren’t true, at least he had a local to guide him around.
Scanning the available books he couldn’t find other ones that had any magical sounding title. Shame, he was limited to the introductory book for now. Not really leaving the building he sat down and started reading the book properly, he had been skipping a bit back and forth, missing a lot of details he found when he came back to those pages before so this round he’d read it from cover to cover, that should give him a better picture, right?
Not realising how long he had been reading he suddenly realised that he was being spoken to due to a clap!
“Ah, good, welcome back to reality” Angela smiled at him with her hands together. Apparently he was so into the book that he must have missed her speaking to him before.
She continued speaking before he could really reply. “You were pretty deep in it, I assume that you found something interesting?”
She had moved from her position not far from the door to taking one of the chairs around the table.
“Yes, I did, but this book is annoying...” Gilliam started his answer as he turned back to the book, pointing and flipping pages as he explained.
“The book does a good job in explaining the idea behind what Arcane magic is, but besides the test-spells for each element it only mentions a lot of concepts that it doesn’t explain. Like the Foci, Structured and Unstructured spells, that these spells are formless, whatever that means and... Hell, it doesn’t even properly explain much about the Light element. The other elements have details that hints to many other spells or concepts, but the Light chapter only explains the basic healing and that you have to study hard...”
He sounded quite frustrated, yes this was just an introductory book but he was used to Earth’s level of guidance material. Any good or smartly written material would at least explain the base concept in introductory books... Or at least the ones he preferred to consider proper.
Angela sat back in her chair with her arms halfway crossed as she rubbed her chin in thought.
“I can’t remember too much from the classes, since they didn’t apply to me I didn’t pay attention. But I can at least explain why Light is so poorly explained.”
Gilliam’s annoyed face lit up considerably, proper information!
“The thing about the Light element is that, depending on which teacher you have, and I had a really, really good teacher, there are different thoughts on how many spells there really are. Dad boiled it down to a single spell; Cure.”
She unfurled her arms and emphasised her explanations with her hands.
“If you want to heal a wound; you cure it. If you want to remove parasites; you cure it. If you want to remove poison from the bloodstream; you cure it... I’m sure you can see where I’m going.”
She took his book away and flipped to the Light section, which was considerably shorter than the others. “So when the book is teaching you one spell, it’s teaching you the one spell in the Light element. The reason it’s so hard to master is that it requires understanding of the body you are curing. Wounds are often the easiest as we have grown up seeing what our bodies do, how the wounds close and heal over time, with Light magic you are simply speeding that up with your own energy.”
She continued to explain that the Light element is one spell applied with knowledge, so anatomical knowledge was incredibly important. Lesser educated healing mages could only do wounds and fevers because they didn’t know what your bodies were doing for the more complicated stuff. One could cast twelve different fireballs or fire spells, that only needed knowledge of what fire was and either make or learn a spell about it. But Light uses the same spell for any application, it’s just how you move your mana around in your own, or your patient’s body.
Gilliam blinked a few times sort of mentally vacantly to her explanation. This was very different to how he expected it to work. But it sort of made sense?
If so, his modern understanding of how the body worked could aid him... if that was the correct method of thinking, of course.
Angela continued. “As for the other spells, the formless spells are the ones you can cast without first making a magic circle. I never learned to do it but as part of casting certain spells, to focus and control the energy properly you will need to make a magic circle, most mages can make these in the air but I think there are ways around it but... I’m not good enough to explain that to you..” She ended the explanation with a look of defeat.
She had explained before that she was a healing mage, but she could only use her magic on herself, if so it made a lot of sense why she didn’t bother with all the other things.
Changing into a more commanding tone her face became sterner as she got up from her chair.
“For now, keep training with what you have, we can’t have my future hero slack off now, can we?!”
Gilliam felt again invigorated by this, there were decent explanations to things and... Well, he just needed a better teacher. Angela seemed to have the basics of Light magic since she was a Light mage, but due to her restrictions she slacked off learning the rest. Gilliam could absolutely appreciate this, the ‘doesn’t affect me’ kind of mentality had his attention decline in several classes as well so it would be somewhat hypocritical of him to complain to her about it.
For now he would master these Unstructured Formless spells in the book, if he was supposed to be some sort of über mage, he was going to give it a proper effort!
Turning back to the book he kept reading where he had left off before Angela clapped him back to reality, instantly going back to his bubble of existence he didn’t properly notice Angela leaving the room, it was time to read about Darkness magic!