It was morning, and I had already started working with the thundercite. Marie, Rose, and I stood before it watching the piece of ore intermittently shoot off electricity.
Dad wasn’t around today. Normally, I wasn’t supposed to conduct experiments without him, but he said I could with Marie so long as it wasn’t dangerous. To comply with Dad’s instructions, we had a bucket full of water located nearby. This was the extent of our safety measures in Dad’s mind.
Rose was here, staring at us like we were crazy. Unable to stand it anymore, I turned to Marie.
“Uh, um, Marie.”
She glanced at me. “Hmm? What is it?”
We were close. So, so, so close. Marie and I had our arms linked together, pressed together close enough to feel each other’s body heat. We’d been as thick as thieves ever since we cleared the air. Now we spent as much time together as ever, and we now felt closer than before. We might’ve seemed like a couple of cute kittens, but I had to admit it felt more like we were lovers than siblings. It was nice to be close with her, but Dad would say something if we were too clingy. Thinking about the future, I also had to admit that this would probably be the closest we could ever be. But I decided to not worry about that for now.
What I was currently worried about was that I couldn’t stand to be this close to Marie right now considering Rose’s glaring.
“Marie, I need you to back up,” I said.
“Huh? Why?”
“Well, I’m going to do the experiment. It might be dangerous for you.”
“I’m in your way?” Her eyes trembled.
What the heck? This resembled the kind of flirting I’d see among couples back in Japan. They always disgusted me and I wanted to curse them. Now I stood in the same position as siblings.
“No, you’re not in the way! But it’ll be easier to do the experiment if you back up a little.”
Biting her tongue, Marie pulled back. I saw her gaze fall to my right arm. Did she have some sort of special attachment to it?
“Fine, fine,” she said, puffing her cheeks and backing away.
She sat down in the corner of the garden and hugged her knees. I knew that Marie had a bratty side, although she always understood once I explained things to her. Still, I wished she wouldn’t act like this around Rose. Unfortunately, it was too late.
Rose, who normally was nothing but collected and logical, seemed to have broken down around the uncomfortable atmosphere of sibling love, and resorted to glaring pointedly at us. It was a viciously thorny, accusatory glare. I had never seen her display such expression since the goblin attack. I’ll come up with some explanation for her later, I decided.
I gave a small sigh. It was time to get back to business and start today’s research. First things first: revenge. There were a few different experiments I had been conducting recently. The goal for all of them was to change the shape of my mana.
Up until recently, my mana always released in the shape of an orb. That was probably its natural shape when it didn’t have any other command. After experimenting with various shapes, I drew several conclusions.
Firstly, the amount of mana ejected from the body can be modulated.
When I released mana without any particular command, it appeared in the shape of an orb about eight inches in diameter. With specific commands, I could thin it out and extend it. Let’s say you had sixty mana inside and sixty mana outside the body. That ratio isn’t fixed. Instead, you could keep eighty inside the body and eject forty outside. The only thing that was fixed was the sum total of mana. In my case, it was 120, but the real amount would vary by the individual.
I didn’t intend to calculate the exact amount of mana I had at the moment, but I was confident about this principle. Maybe it was self-explanatory.
Once the mana was outside of your body, it couldn’t be altered any more. It would only naturally decrease. Once it exited the body, the energy would slowly drain away. This realization raised several new questions to my mind. How much could the amount of mana change once it exited the body?
For example, I could spread out the fixed amount of mana to form an orb over a hundred feet in diameter. If it was spread too thin, it wouldn’t activate properly as magic. It wouldn’t catch fire or interact with electricity. Basically, there needed to be a certain density of mana for me to use Flare or any other sort of magic spell.
I found out that an orb about fifteen feet in diameter would barely catch the electric current. A ten foot orb would softly spark only for the briefest moment. At three feet, it would light up bright and the spark clearly visible.
So, the density of mana had an undisputed effect on its interaction with elements. There certainly wasn’t much point in having electricity run sparsely through a twenty-foot radius. You’d feel a tingle and nothing more.
As for Flare, the mana only caught fire when it was close to my default orb size. Anything thinner and it wouldn’t even light. This rendered the technique useless.
So, what would happen if I shrunk down the orbs’ size, which increased the mana’s concentration? In the case of electricity, it just let off a flash. I suppose the orb didn’t have enough volume to interact properly with the current. Maybe the voltage was higher, but I couldn’t see any way to make use of it.
The result for Flare was different from my expectations. The fire looked just like the flame of a gas burner. Compared to the normal lump of flame, the increased density of mana was clearly creating a more powerful fire.
To test this out, I tried striking a piece of firewood with both types of Flare. The normal-sized Flare, of course, lit up the firewood, which then slowly started to burn. The new Flare—which I called Gas Flare—scorched the wood the moment it touched it. The firewood lit up, and from there, the fire seemed to grow normally. The scorch marks on the wood, however, told me tell that Gas Flare packed a punch. Flare lasted longer. It stayed in the air up to five seconds while Gas Flare only lasted about three seconds. That meant that Flare could shoot about twice as far as Gas Flare, at about thirty instead of fifteen feet.