The pegs glimmered with light as they received my mana, and the magic circle was complete. It began to groan, and I felt it gobbling up my mana like God had stuck a straw in me and got to sucking. Usually you’d need a staff to channel powerful magic like this, but I’d pursued the path of simplicity and pumped it all through my lunar ring. The toll that it took made sense, considering that the thing I was trying to achieve was patently ridiculous.
The lights that appeared in the circle formed a pentagram. Depending where you were from, this symbol, capable of being drawn with one single brushstroke, would appear to some as a symbol used in Hermetic ritual, as the onmyoji Seimei’s seal, or even as the Elder Sign to ward off the Great Old Ones. In truth, this magic circle stole the best parts of all of these. The pentagram itself warded off demons, which extended to the expulsion of one’s enemies. The fact that it could be drawn with one line indicated an enclosed space. And of course, whosoever stood in the middle of the Elder Sign would be consumed by a pillar of flame.
The sheer semiotic sledgehammer to the face of it all really made my inner middle schooler explode with excitement, but I made the excuse (silently) that it served a purpose and wasn’t just edgy for edginess’s sake.
“Dammit! This isn’t good! But...”
“Don’t think you can get out of this,” I said.
The zombie tried to hop away on its one remaining leg, but a couple of sword-laden Unseen Hands kept it in place.
It had cried about losing someone precious to it, so that meant it was an important playing piece. I wasn’t sure if they were a wyvern knight or part of the imperial guard, but they had forced me to reveal my hand. It wasn’t quite a fair trade, but I’d take one of their pieces as recompense.
I knew I was pretty much bone dry on mana now that I had forced out the Order and used my Independent Processing to finish this magic circle. I felt my brain bubble with the complex magical formulae; even though the brain had no nerve endings to register pain with, it felt like it was scraping at the inside of my head.
Magia saw magic circles as an extravagance and a waste, but it still took this much energy! And yet, I’d still gotten carried away with giving it a go; I wished I could punch my past self.
“Enclose, my circle. Burn bright, my symbol, and light the shadowed path ahead...”
I felt a sticky feeling on my tongue as I recited the incantation. My nose was bleeding—the second symptom of mana depletion. I accepted it; at least I wasn’t bleeding from the ears. I’d be stuck with a headache akin to a forty-eight hour hangover, but it beat dying.
Space itself seemed to scrape together as a hugely powerful Insulating Barrier separated the world from the inside of the magic circle, twisting the laws of physics temporarily. Magic that upended physical law was pretty efficient so long as you configured the spell to solve a very specific problem, but unless I isolated this particular effect to a localized area, then I’d end up burning everything in the vicinity, myself included. Most of the mana cost behind this technique was just keeping containment. Now enclosed inside, the zombie, nothing more than an imminent corpse, punched at the insides of the barrier.
“Enfold the creaking paths. Abandon the scream of time and the laws of stars. Enclose the body within...”
Space-bending magic required a lot of uncool elements just to complete. If Lady Agrippina were here to see this, she would probably clutch her stomach as she reeled back with laughter before giving me a multihour lecture about what a dunce I was for trying this. Then she’d start laughing again at the fact that even all this wasn’t enough to let me so much as move people.
It was, well, uh... I guessed I had about a sixty percent chance of succeeding as I was. It would be akin to pumping my fist and celebrating that I’d managed to safely deliver living organisms with magic...while ignoring that nearly half of the ten lab rats were dead. I hoped that painted the appropriate picture. In my eyes, sixty percent was as good as zero percent: a transparent failure.
However, I didn’t want to waste all the experience I’d poured into improving my space-bending magic, so I’d combined it with a barrier to protect people during the process—Lady Agrippina could do the same with a paper-thin barrier—in order to transform it into an offensive spell.
“Heat that awaits at the end of the path, glow with no further destination ahead. Lay together and look to the firmament...”
Inside the barrier, the atomic composition of the particles in the air were altered, and for just a moment hydrogen transformed into deuterium and tritium. These particles mixed together and formed helium and neutrons as the space began to heat up.
“The beginning of the path is also the end... Entangle seams, openings...”
This process was called thermonuclear fusion. The heat produced by such a reaction, as you might have guessed, was said to be on par with the sun itself.
The space inside the barrier momentarily became subject to the same physical laws that governed the heart of a star. If I hadn’t enclosed that space and made sure the center was conceptually structured around a columnar formation, it wouldn’t have remained concentrated in that space—the neutron beams would have unraveled our chromosomes.
“The cycle ends here! Come together and depart forevermore!”
A pillar of blazing hell exploded in a half breath with the power to eliminate just about any living thing with a form on this planet. Just before the barrier collapsed, a tear opened in space to dump all that heat and radiation into a remote abyss.
Extreme heat that I could barely control; a barrier that could only survive just a little more; space-bending magic that was too incomplete to send living organisms through—I’d mashed it all together into a ghastly kludge. When the last of the mana burnt out and the spell was over, all that was left was a melted husk.
Learning my lesson from the time I’d sent the Craving Blade off with my space-bending magic only for it to return, I made sure that my spell properly incinerated the enemy before it erased both the enemy and the lingering heat.
“I am become Death...destroyer of worlds...” I said between heavy, panting breaths.
With these final closing words, the creaking barrier vanished and the lingering contamination disappeared.
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
It was a bit embarrassing to have cribbed from Oppenheimer, but it fit the scene.
It felt uncool to call it a technique for removing what monsters my sword couldn’t slay, but I couldn’t ignore that yet again, I’d made a top secret weapon and yet again, I’d been forced to show it off. It wouldn’t work again against the mage who had been remote controlling the zombie. It was a true kill-on-sight maneuver with firepower to reduce you to nothing as soon as the barrier broke, and unless you were a certain zodiac knight, there was no coming back from it. It had been a necessary decision, but it had cost me dearly.
Now I really was flat broke. If the GM dared tell me there was another climax after this, I’d string them up by their heels before going home. If they still hadn’t learned their lesson, I’d shake them about and leave them up to dry for a few more days.
“Ngh...”
Now that the pressure was off me, suddenly my world was spinning. I clutched my head as it twinged and felt an unpleasant sensation near my ears. Dammit, I was bleeding. I’d used way too much mana. I quickly rummaged in my pouch and chugged a mana-replenishing draught Kaya had made for me.
I’d let it all rip, refusing to die here, but I’d used up way more mana than I’d realized. My pipe was designed to replenish my mana supply in times of an emergency, but if I didn’t have the time to fill it with herbs, I had some cigarettes made so that I could quickly recover. I put one between my lips and lit up.
Even with their help, I still felt a pounding in my skull, as if I were trapped inside a bell. Alongside the pain was the scraping sound of the Craving Blade, wondering why I hadn’t let it land the felling blow...
“We won...right?” Sieg said.
“Yeah. A group victory,” I replied.
Siegfried had come wandering over to me while I sat on my butt recovering, however, my reply only garnered an angry glare.
“I have a whole ton of things I wanna ask you,” he said.
Ugh, can’t he let me off the hook? I thought. No, I suppose not...
I blew out a cloud of purple smoke and looked to the heavens, wondering how I was going to explain this. The Night Goddess, barely present, gave no reply; the stars around Her twinkled in silence.
Things really never went my way, huh...
[Tips] In order to safely pass a living organism to another space, you need enough precision to not only open the gateway but also the skill to get the organism through alive.
✦ ✦ ✦
