✦ ✦ ✦
At last, she stopped and let out a tiny sigh. She used her right hand to take the cap off of another bottle and tilted it over the thread in her hand. A thick, red liquid oozed from the container, slowly cresting the lip and spilling a single drop onto the thread.
Vermilion light raced through it instantly. The liquid must have reacted with the powder in the thread. The thread, now aglow with red light, instantly elongated, tracing across the glowing blade, causing the delicate patterns—or maybe words—glowing in crimson to rise up.
Alaina whispered something. It was probably a spell, but it didn’t use any of the chaos words I knew, so I didn’t understand it. Then, instantly...
Plink.
With the tiniest of sounds, the vermilion pattern burst away from the blade. The light in the air grew stronger for a short moment before vanishing into the dark of the cave, leaving only an afterimage burned into our eyes. At the same time, the faint purple shine of the blade became clearly, if subtly, brighter.
“That should do it.” Alaina looked at me and nodded. “Try it.”
“Take it away, Gourry.”
“Sure!” Gourry stepped forward, took the sword by the hilt, looked around, and walked over to a rock the size of my fist sitting in a corner of the cave. He touched the blade to the rock to get a sense for the feel of it, and... “Hmm...” He unceremoniously moved his arm.
Kwip. With a sound like a knife through an apple, the rock split in two.
Jeez... That thing really is too dang sharp.
Gourry gazed intently at the blade. “This’ll cut through the sheath if I sheathe it, won’t it?”
Alaina, watching the spectacle, said, “Was the person who made that sword rather stupid, perchance?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself.”
You saw that sometimes with artisans. They’d master their crafts to such a degree that, in an attempt to truly test their limits, they’d make things utterly unusable in the day-to-day. There was nothing left even in legend to tell us who’d made the Blast Sword, but I had a feeling they were that kind of person. The sword was so sharp it actually made it harder to wield, which was probably why it had been hidden inside the blade of another sword when we’d first found it. Kind of defeating the point, one could say...
“I think this will be able to cut through Zanaffar armor, but I wish he didn’t have to hold it unsheathed the whole time,” I said.
Alaina thought a while. “What if I were to place spell-writing on the sheath to blunt its contents? Then it would stop slicing the sheath while inside.”
“Great idea! Can you do that, Alaina?!”
“Shall I do it right now?”
“Thank you! Please! Gourry, hand me the sheath! Then hold the sword until it’s done!”
Alaina changed the lineup of her rocks, then returned the leaves and bones to their bags and replaced them with a different set of leaves and twigs.
...
“By the way, Alaina, a question. Do the rocks and leaves and stuff do anything? You didn’t use them.”
“Pardon?” A shocked expression flashed across her face. She then said, “Oh... yes, I place them to create a ritual magic circle.”
“You do what?!” She’d said something so incredible so casually that I found myself shouting in response.
See, we humans had ritual magic circles too, but they required a variety of special materials and magic concoctions mixed into an ink then painted in a circle of specified size. You also had to have various magical objects placed around it. But she was saying that she could—pardon the expression—throw some random crap together to do the same thing? Really, to do it even better?
“And once the circle is complete, elves can ‘see’ it, right?”
“Yes, of course. Though until it’s complete, it’s just rocks and grass.”
I thought a minute, then made a proposal I felt sure would be impossible. “Here’s another question... Could you use a magic circle like that to significantly enhance someone’s magic power?”
“I could with the proper space and the necessary tools,” she responded easily.
“You could?!”
“Yes. But even if I enhance your magical power, Lina, if you leave the circle, the effect will naturally extinguish. It would only boost the power of attack spells you cast while inside the circle.”
“Yeah, I get that. To tell you the truth, I used to have talismans that enhanced my magical power, but stuff happened and I lost ’em. So I’ve got a whole lotta spells I can’t use now. If I could whip those out, even under such limited circumstances, I think they’d come in mighty handy. Now, there are a few other things I wanna ask you...”
There was still no guarantee I could use the spells I was thinking of, but if I could, it’d be a huge boon.
For a while after that, I talked Alaina’s ear off with questions about elf magic...