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Fu Shang was an average student at an average magic school in Jian Sha, one of the eastern countries in Nostriva. At Jian Sha, there was no talk of “emotion-based casting”. So long as you had an affinity for mana, magic was simply performed by memorizing the lengthy activation steps for your medium. Even medium crafters would learn by rote memory – etching a sequence of strange symbols or words onto the medium would produce a certain outcome when the spell was activated. That was all that was needed.

When Pendulus’s Technomagicry Revolution hit Jian Sha, her parents, who were B Tier mages, had no problems adapting to the new system. They simply had to apply their capacity for memorizing spell instructions to the production of technomagical goods.

Learn, memorize, cast your spell on the part of the production line that you were assigned to. Rinse and repeat daily.

But Fu Shang’s curiosity led her deeper away from what was average and mainstream. She wanted to work with the essence of magic, and from what she knew, only the acclaimed School of Heartspell taught it. However, it wasn’t a school that someone like her could even dream of getting enrolled in. So, for the longest time, she buried her curiosity, stuck her head down, and studied magic the normal way.

With long brown hair that hung all the way to her waist, round, innocent black eyes that perfectly complemented her small, thin, slightly upturned nose, Fu Shang struck the genetic lottery when it came to understated attractiveness. Her slovenly speech and obsession with magic made her far less popular than most other girls, and she never felt driven to dress in a way that accentuated her slim but ample figure either. Yet, she had her fair share of boys trying to get close to her by ‘teaching her magic’.

Without exception, every one of these bravehearted souls, seduced by the allure of dating someone whom they perceived as an unpolished gem, fled with their tails between their legs within a week. It was understandable - anyone who tried to teach Fu Shang magic was treated as a competitor, and instead of reading between the lines, she quickly showed each of her prospective suitors who was boss.

The crazed look in her eyes as she took the spell they were ‘teaching’ her, amped it up with an arcane modification or two before detonating it way too close to their faces, was the last thing any of them remembered before abandoning all attempts to romance her.

And that was her life – being a normal magician, studying magic the normal way - at least until that fateful and glorious day when her parents’ factory was targeted by Coalesce terrorists. She was on the way to the factory after school to meet her parents at the diner nearby for a meal when the attack happened.

The magical terrorists used spells that even a B Tier mage like her could easily handle, but what made her stare dumbfoundedly at the scene, rather than runaway like all the other passersby, was the fact that none of them needed the extended preparation time that was typical of the average spell.

She saw them churn out spell after spell, taking down armed guards with ease. Sure enough, they were only using C to B Tier spells, but their casting speed was ridiculous. Not even the top instructors in her school could do that.

There was only one explanation for it. Those Coalesce terrorists, for whatever reason, knew the secrets behind “emotion-based casting” - they knew the essence of magic!

The world called them terrorists, but to her magic-obsessed eyes, she saw them as geniuses who possessed secret knowledge, knowledge that she greedily desired. It was impossible for a B Tier mage like herself to enroll in the School of Heartspell, but if she could get anyone of these genius mages to teach her what they knew…

And thus, her parents survived the attack, but her patience with living a mundane life in a mundane family did not. Next thing she knew, she was attending one of those revolutionary camps organized by the Coalesce themselves.

Of course, to the outside world, it was just a typical “humanitarian camp”, organized by a typical grassroots community, supposedly providing educational resources to the down-and-out denizens in the poorest neighborhoods of Jian Sha. But Fu Shang had been following their activities very closely, and found that it was easy to sign up as a Coalesce recruit if one knew what to look out for.

While she was staunchly apolitical and did not care if Nostrivans used technomagicry or not, she knew how to act and what to say to get the Coalesce recruiters to approve of her. Her accurate recital of the anti-technomagic spiel that she picked up from observing them easily won over their acceptance.

But teenagers from Jian Sha often had helicopter parents, and Fu Shang needed to appease them as well, or they’ll start digging and get everyone in trouble.

Fortunately, the Coalesce recruiters in Jian Sha were experienced with the ins-and-outs of bringing in teenagers. They were able to easily forge high-quality documents that reassured the families of those involved that they were in fact, signing up for a reputable, stay-in magic school, rather than, say, a terrorist organization. The last thing they would want, after all, was nosy parents scrutinizing their activities.

With forged documents, Fu Shang convinced her parents that she was furthering her studies at a fairly reputable magic school, even though that could not be further from the truth. But she didn’t care. She was finally able to embark on the most exciting journey of her life – learning emotion-based spell casting as a mere B Tier mage!

~-------*-------~

Fu Shang flinched when she heard a buzz echo out in some corner of the FloatingScreen manufacturing plant. “Relax, that’s just a random factory sound. All the guards have gone elsewhere, remember?” said Team Leader Vishnod, before continuing his briefing.

“Coward,” sniggered Tricia.

“What did you say?!” retorted Fu Shang, with clenched fists.

“Calm down, ladies,” sighed Vishnod wearily.

After a quick review of the plan, Vishnod rolled up the large map of the factory’s layout, and led the way. There were many twists and turns, but the three infiltrators, who had memorized the safe route by heart, finally reached their destination. Fu Shang recognized the room immediately; her personalized briefing contained pictures of both the interior and exterior of that critical location.

Vishnod placed his hand on the door, casting yet another DoorHack spell to safely let Fu Shang in without triggering the alarm. She noticed that Tricia remained outside.

I guess her personalized briefing instructed her not to come in. I wonder what they tasked that annoying lass with.

Inside, she spent a second or two gaping at what looked like an engineering marvel. There were wires and tubes everywhere, conveyer belts carrying electronic parts in and out of the room; she could not understand how everything worked in concert, but it did, like a conductor-less orchestra.

Right at the center of the sprawling belts, wires, and tubes was a suspended crystal, bobbing up and down in midair, emitting a curious melodic hum every once in a while. Its purple shine was reminiscent of amethyst, and it stole all of Fu Shang’s attention.

I saw this in my briefing docket, that must be the key to making all those FloatingScreens float…

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

According to Coalesce doctrine, the technomagical factories erected throughout Nostriva had replaced hundreds of thousands of workers with powerful, automated magic. Here in Eastern Caschian, it was popular amongst the working class to direct their hatred towards large, Multi-Bloc Corporations like the Pendulus-backed AutoMagic Incorporated, who was one of the first to automate factory lines with magic. Their FloatingScreen plant was iconic in Eastern Caschian, and nothing quite said “we have your back” like sabotaging the flagship plant that recently laid off three thousand hard-working people last quarter.

Fu Shang did not really care for the politics, and she honestly thought that it made sense for magic and engineering to work in tandem.

I mean… look at how beautifully the parts are moving. I wish I can just take that crystal to analyze how it works!

She admired the technomagical marvel for one last time before scanning the room for the only blue cannister in the room. Her job was to cast a LaserIncision spell at that blue cannister and destroy whatever critical component was inside. It would supposedly cause the entire manufacturing plant to shut down for a month.

I’ve no idea how this’d actually help the remaining workers who’re still working in the factory, not to mention all the folks in retail who’ll be impacted by a FloatingScreen production slowdown. But hey, anything for the Coalesce so long as they teach me more magic!

And she had good reason to believe that they will.

Soon after her recruitment into the Incitement Team, she was already assigned a SpellMentor who drilled her in the fundamentals of emotion-based casting. Emotion-based casting! It was the very secret of magic that she had always wanted to learn. In this sense, they were not stingy at all.

After slightly over a year of intense training, she was ready to set down her traditional mediums, and use modified mediums instead. Those tools required mastery of at least the basics in emotion-based casting. They did away with the tedious rituals that often preceded most traditional spells – like chanting verses, inscribing magic circles, doing strange dances, and so on – and allowed the mage to cast spells more quickly and effectively.

The ease of using those modified mediums blew her away. Coming from an average magic school, she wasn’t used to being able to activate mediums with such speed and precision. A simple MatchLighter spell for instance – something commonly used by teenage mage students in camping trips – was cut down from a lengthy twelve-sentence-long chant to a single tap on a medium.

Of course, as a B Tier mage, she had never been entrusted with mediums that used more than the safe threshold of mana. So, she could cast spells speedily, but they were not all that powerful. However, after two years of guided training under her SpellMentor, she was finally ready to use spells with a higher mana cost. She now had speed and power.

And this was the first mission where she’d get to put her new skills to the test.

But first things first. She needed mana to cast spells, and with all that stress from earlier, she had legitimately forgotten to replenish her mana store before the mission.

No time like the present, I guess.

Just as she was taught, she started converting the fear she had experienced into mana. Thankfully, in a high-stakes operation like this, there was more than enough fear to go around. She recalled the scene of that SnifferCerberus sniffing in the air, and in an instant, her mouth went dry at the thought of having her limbs ripped out by that humongous beast.

She quickly channeled that emotion into fear mana – it wasn’t much due to her very average, B Tier talent, but it was enough to power the medium – and accumulated it in her mana store. In a mage’s body, the mana store for fear mana was in the hands and feet. As she focused on cultivating fear mana, she could feel subtle sensations in both hands and feet, a sign from experience that her efforts were paying off.

“Did you forget to fill up your mana store again?” yelled Tricia sharply from outside. “You’re taking way too much time.”

“It’s easier for me to do it mid-mission - I use fear mana, remember?” yelled back Fu Shang with the quickest excuse she could think of to make her mistake look intentional.

‘Dammit girls. Let’s just get back on task.” Vishnod was starting to sound testy too, perhaps because Fu Shang broke protocol by not starting the mission with a full mana store.

She returned her focus to filling up her mana store to about a tenth of her total capacity – just slightly more than enough to fire off that LaserIncision spell. Having converted enough fear into mana, she drew the wand from the utility belt she wore on her hips. As a modified medium, it was convenient to use. She simply aimed at the blue cannister, and squeezed.

On the medium’s activation, Fu Shang could feel a strong flood of mana leaving her mana store, not just from the hands, but also out and up from her feet, and finally into the wand. She had never experienced almost a tenth of her total capacity flow out of her mana stores at once, and the tingling sensations that came with it was prominent and lasting.

What a power-hungry spell.

The wand molded the mana into intense, concentrated light, which then took the form of a hot prismatic beam, sizzling on contact with air as it connected the wand to the blue cannister in a split second. The laser beam persisted through the cannister, melting its blue metallic shell in an instant.

Fu Shang held the wand steady in her hands, mouth agape as she witnessed the pure destructive power of the incisive spell. Shortly, there was a satisfying sizzle, crackle, and pop, then the entire room’s machinations stopped in their tracks; the conveyor belts stopped moving, and even the floating crystal tumbled onto the container, no longer humming its mysterious melody.

Just years ago, she would not have believed that she could ever cast a spell like this with a mere squeeze of the wand. It would have taken fifteen minutes of prep work at the very least. But she was no longer the same, uninitiated mage of the past. She now knew emotion-based magic, and with it, its signature perks of both speed and power.

Did you see that?! I’m the Lord of Lasers now!! Worship me!

The spell was powerful indeed, but it used more mana than she was used to. With that much mana leaving her store at once, Vishnod’s warning – which she had shoved into an old dusty corner at the back of her mind, behind the shelves and shelves of spell systems which she had lovingly memorized, and further behind the laser-induced power fantasy that was now monopolizing all of her attention – finally became salient.

In her excitement, she made a legitimate mistake that a mage with her experience should never have made - she forgot to take the appropriate measures to counteract the side-effects of casting that powerful, mana-hungry spell.

And now, she would have to pay the price for it.

“I heard the explosions, Fu Shang. You’re done right?” inquired Vishnod. “We’ve gotta leave the room now. You need to activate the second medium that gives us that speed buff,” he said from outside the room. “Fu Shang?” he shouted again. “Dammit! She’s not replying.”

“I bet she forgot to apply the counteracting technique,” said Tricia snidely, barely hiding the irritation in her voice. She sounded particularly ticked off, possibly at the fact that her senior had worse adherence to mission protocol than her.

Fu Shang could hear their conversation outside, but the price of her mistake was already taking a toll on her, and she could not reply.

Without the counteracting technique, the excessive mana that was released returned to their liquidated, emotional form, and they flooded back into her almost as if with a vengeance. Without mercy, it forced her to experience an amplified version of the very emotions that she transmuted into mana in the first place.

She was quickly consumed by a deluge of terrifying thoughts, which felt at the moment so visceral that she could not distinguish it from reality. It was no coincidence that a certain three-headed canine was prominently featured in them; she did conjure up images of it earlier to cultivate fear mana, after all.

Her heart pounded in fear from scene after scene of that large guard dog chasing after her. In every one of the scenes, she was breathless, and turned around only to feel its heavy body knocking her down into the cold, hard asphalt. Then before she could get up, two of its gigantic heads would gnash their sharp teeth at her before ripping her flesh from the bone. She would scream pathetically, while the third head looked on, a maniacal grin on its face. And then the scene would repeat, but at a slightly different location, with a slightly different angle of impact, and featuring a slightly different part of her flesh being ripped off.

Needless to say, she was fully petrified, lost in a looping nightmare, paralyzed by the very fear that powered her spell just a few moments earlier.

Vishnod peeked into the room and saw Fu Shang cowering in one corner with her hands to her head. “Gen – ahem – High Lord Genevieve,” corrected Vishnod before he could call the High Lord by his preferred pet name, “estimated a fifty percent chance of Fu Shang successfully dealing with the side effects of that spell.” Pointing to the petrified Fu Shang, he said, “I guess we got on the wrong side of that coin toss.”

“Not surprising. I think fifty percent’s too generous,” said Tricia drolly.

“Luckily the High Lord planned for this. Ready to execute Plan B?”

Tricia nodded, that snarl on her face surprisingly comforting at a moment like this.

Having destroyed the blue cannister, the factory was now only capable of producing regular screens, and not the floating ones that they were purposed for. There was no way AutoMagic Incorporated would let anybody tamper with it and get away unscathed.

As expected, the emergency protocol was triggered. Towards the trio came flying a swarm of security drones. Each of the flying automatons were armed with VoltageShock spells, ready to fire at the culprits responsible for arousing their ire.

Despite having made preparations, Vishnod felt a pit of dread in his gut. He had seen them in action before - a single, well-placed shot was enough to render a human being motionless; it was only a matter of transporting them to a prison cell after that. And with Fu Shang out for the count, it was down to Tricia and himself, spell mediums at hand, to hold off the swarm, and save themselves from possible incarceration.