Predawn twilight greeted Ulric's eyes as he woke. Throwing off the furs of his pallet he felt distinctly a crispness to the air that had only been hinted at yesterday evening. The air was cool enough that he was glad to squat next to the fireplace and stoke it to a blaze. Brighteyes never stirred during this process, other than to snore loudly. His recovering body made loud the declaration of its intent to rest.
Satisfied that things were well under control within the shelter, Ulric headed out into the clear glade morning. Leaves, once a riot of golds and reds, now trended towards browns. Heavy frost lie thickly on the leaves of canopy, the bark of towering trees, and the flora of the glade. Taking a deep breath Ulric relished the taste of this air. No car exhaust, no stink of asphalt, no fouling of garbage and people. Only the smell of leaves, litter, soil, and faint tannin greeted his nose. It was a beautiful gift, and a reminder that the peoples of his old world had brought ruin to paradise. He quickly averted his thoughts, before they could spiral into pointless remonstration against the desecrations brought on by shortsighted and profoundly greedy humans.
This morning he'd work on magic. His body thrummed with the energy of core saturation, his mind sharpened under its influence. Ulric had learned to recognize that core saturation was a passive benefit. While in effect, he was just a little more. Once he cast a spell and his core was forced to draw mana from the air and refine it to his own use, he'd lose the extra mental clarity so best to do his pre planning before anything else. In many ways, core saturation felt like a fresh cup of coffee. Damn if Ulric couldn't go for a hot cup of Joe.
Putting aside the memory of a Colombian roast, Ulric decided to expand on his lightning magic. [Absolute Zero] had reinforced his earlier suspicions that the laws of physics were still, mostly, in play. Mana seemed to be able to manipulate or interact with the world on some fundamental level, letting you change things that couldn't be changed on his old world. The set of spells he'd made during his rainy season meditations had relied heavily on his understanding of the mechanics of matter and energy on his old world but it was lightning that he'd created by instinct alone, back when his core awakened as he'd fought the [Forest Lord].
Reasons for that were clear enough, lightning scared the hell out of him. He'd damn near died from it and he'd been around enough high voltage sources to have heard the horror stories electricians told about people who'd made mistakes guiding the humble electron. Experienced electricians working near substations that weren't grounded well enough stepping on a shallow gravel and being evaporated by spontaneous grounding. Large capacitor banks being discharged accidently, blowing the careless offender out of their shoes. It had culminated in, not exactly a phobia, but a complete and total appreciation for the destruction electricity could enact on living things.
For one, above and beyond many other types of magic, it seemed like Ceraun was able to bypass defenses. Metal armor just made you into a conduit. It didn't need to surround or cut like Caelum or Aquae. Incendere was great for fucking an entire area but, for a single target in particular, was comparatively highly inefficient. Past those qualities, what drew Ulric to Ceraun for pure destructive purpose was speed. It was, for all intents and purposes, impossible to dodge. Lethal power delivered at the speed of light, power that would not only outright destroy the body through resistive heating, it would obliterate all controllable nervous and muscular function. And it had saved Ulric's life twice now.
[Voltaic grip] was a spell that had come by instinct, born from a desire to destroy completely the monster that lay in reach. The spell functioned by using mana to pull and separate charge, building an enormous potential between the hands and then consuming mana to push the current. But it almost required Ulric to touch with both hands whatever he wanted to attack, something that was not highly recommended in many cases. The [Shadow Panther] would have gutted him before he could touch it, to say nothing of the [Venom Bolt Viper], which would have almost certainly dissolved him long before he got within reach.
The trick then was to get his spell to operate at a distance, without including him in its scope. At no point did he want himself to be part of the flow of power. It seemed like you enjoyed a bit of protection from the effects of your own mana, but [Absolute Zero] showed him that when your mana influenced the outside world, you just had to deal with the consequences. You didn't set yourself on fire when you held a fireball, but if you went and stood in the burning ground where it landed you weren't getting out unscathed. Similarly, when he used [Voltaic grip] he didn't get included in the circuit, sort of like a capacitor plate didn't get damaged in the discharge. Anything in between, however, was in trouble.
Ulric decided to try the classical approach. In simplest terms, electricity was all about a path of least resistance and a separation of charges. You could create the separation with a power source, provided there wasn't a short, hence a nonconductive system was needed between charge pools. In his case, he'd use mana as his power source. Then you needed a path which was preferable to ground or to connect the positive to negative of your charge separation device aka battery. In many systems, air, or glass, or any stable molecularly uncharged material, really, was good enough to keep the potentials safely separated, with a conductor to give it a safe path.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The rub was, Ulric wasn't going for something safe. He wanted something that was godsdamn dangerous. With that in mind, magic would be his battery, his source of power. There was every chance that he'd create a potential in the process that would laugh at the resistance of air, in which case it would arc to the nearest most conductive thing around, probably him, and reduce it to cinders. All he had to do then, was use magic to ensure that the path the potential used would be his target and not himself or some innocent bystander. It wouldn't take much, not at the level of power he was planning. Just a nudge to either reduce the resistance between his potential and ground zero, or use mana to directly form a conduit, a thought he liked better.
Ulric's goal was to first figure out how much magic he'd need to cause an electrical breakdown, specifically, an avalanche breakdown. Basically, if you put a high enough electric field on a material, its electrons, no matter how happily bound, would be forced to move and thus discharge a current. An avalanche breakdown happens when the displaced electrons hit other electrons and free them as well, causing a cascade of free electrons. The effect not only will generate more current than he initially used, since the material itself turns into an electron source, but the destabilization means that if he reduces his own mana induced potential below the initial breakdown voltage it will still be conductive. Then he can spike his mana, and then drop it and still get a Ceraunic arc to strike his target, reducing the total expense of mana.
His initial target would be air breakdown. Ulric was confident he had the power necessary to do it given the light show his [Voltaic grip] could put on. The major challenge would be distance. A mental reference to his old safety schematics reminded him that the breakdown depended strongly on how far apart the potential difference was spread. In air, it meant you needed 30,000 volts to cross a gap of a single centimeter of air. Rough maths meant his thirtyish centimeter palm separation, the largest he'd managed to arc over using [Overcharge], had required around 900,000 Volts. Soooo…call it an even Megavolt. Sweet Watcher's tits, that was a lotta juice.
Mana was damned potent then, if he could sustain that kind of potential for even a few moments. Which made sense. He could make a wave of fire that was hot enough to melt a guy. That had to be a shit ton of energy. The mana to energy conversion was something like dollars to pesos.
Also helped explain, numerically, exactly how he'd been able to kill the [Forest Lord]. He'd been a bit weaker then but he'd also dumped his entire core into it. It'd been the equivalent of hooking its brain to a high voltage line.
And yet. It wasn't good enough. [Voltaic grip] was, for all intents and purposes, a touch spell. It worked because he wasn't having to push the energy through air, he was using the target to carry the energy. That and what he wanted now was apples and oranges.
Ulric dropped down into a cross legged position in front of his out-door fire place to think things over. Mana was energy efficient, the core let you alter reality, to a certain extent, and the better you understood what you wanted, the more efficient your spell was. Maybe, for all it had served him well, the problem was with how he'd made [Voltaic grip] originally. He certainly hadn't planned the spell. Nor had he been thinking of much at the moment. It had been an impulse, an instinctive need. Then maybe it was fundamentally inefficient, due to its ad hoc nature. Perhaps he'd been brute forcing it. Ulric stood to test out his hypothesis a plan forming.
Mana swirled and surged as Ulric took hold of it, concentrating on the pulse from his core, one hand held out to give him a focal point. His intent was clear: mana to act as a megavolt battery, held in isolation from the surroundings, energy gripped at ready, like a drawn bow. He felt the buildup, mana condensing charge. Crackling and buzzing started at his palm, random arcs, energy wasted as he felt out what he was doing. Ulric tightened his focus, maintaining the separation and strengthening the isolation as charge built. Envisioning swirling whirlpools of charge, yin chasing yang, never catching, he felt the mana respond pulling at his surroundings.
Suddenly the air ionized, flashed into fluorescence, a blue violet sphere materialized in the space through which his will was locked. Ulric had been straining before, like dragging a large rock uphill by a rope. Suddenly the rock was half as heavy and his core surged, launching the swirl of charge into a violent vortex, he couldn't respond fast enough, hadn't been expecting the breakdown, he could feel himself losing his grip on it. Ulric nearly lost the spell in moment of fatal shock at the primal force roiling. His mind locked down on it, focus redoubling. He'd planned this out, he needed an out, a path.
As fast as he could think, Ulric reached out with a string of focus, willing a thread of the coursing air to connect to a nearby rock and forced it to a hairlike spark. A moment before his concentration slipped and the globe of mana bound energy surged through him, the plasma path opened a channel and he clearly felt the discharge.
Light flashed, immediately followed by a crack of sound, and a jagged ribbon of arc light ripped into the doomed rock. Locked water inside the stone vaporized, trapped organics flashed volatilized and ignited and the small boulder ten meters away exploded, flinging shrapnel. Ulric was pelted before he could even form a thought, fragments tearing into leather and exposed flesh.
Ulric was sitting down, somehow. There had been that desperate moment when the spell roared to life. Then a blast of sound, light, and stone. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he ran his forearm across them, coming away red. Red sweat?
Shit. Ulric felt carefully at his face and head finding several lacerations. One of them a centimeter long just above the hairline was bleeding freely. He pulled a small splinter of rock from his skin buried just above his cheekbone not a fingernail away from his left eye. His mind returned to full function over the next few moments while he assessed better than twenty small wounds ranging from bruises to a four centimeter long, finger width spear that had pierced his palm.
At some point he’d gotten a status update, the loud bell tone drowned out by thunder. He gave it a casual inspection while he put pressure on the wound in his hand.
[https://i.imgur.com/QT4cJG5.png]
"Well." Ulric announced to the glade. "That could certainly have gone better."