Chapter 6:
Compound Magic, Spark Gauntlet, and Bolt
IT WAS THE DAY AFTER WE RETURNED FROM Istria. Once we had finished the two Elecsteel products, I had communicated my request to Graste. Graste’s response to that request would have huge implications for my magical research moving forward.
For the time being, I anticipated that I wouldn’t see Graste for a while and restarted my magical research accordingly. There was something that had been bothering me. I headed into the garden with a few tools.
“Oh, Shion? What’re you doing?” Marie called out.
“Last I recall, you were at a dead end with your magic research, no?” Rose asked.
The girls were sweaty, having just finished sparring together. They wiped themselves dry with towels as I approached them across the garden. From time to time I saw them spar like this, usually under Dad’s keen observation.
“A cup and a candle? What for?” Marie asked.
“I suppose he’s going to attempt some peculiar experiment, per usual,” Rose said.
I had captured their curiosity. I always felt a bit uplifted when that happened.
“Just watch and see,” I said.
I placed the candle down on top of a flat stone. I lit it with a match instead of Flare. It was a breezeless day, so the flame flickered calmly.
I put the cup down on top of the candle. When I raised the cup, the flame had extinguished.
“Did you two know that fire can’t burn without oxygen? It goes out when you cover it up like this.”
“Pffth! Of course I knew that!” Marie shouted. She obviously didn’t have a clue.
“Marie, it’s the same as snuffing out an oil lantern. You’ve done that before, haven’t you?” Rose said, exasperated.
Marie looked between the two of us defiantly. Even in this world, it was common knowledge that you could extinguish a fire by covering it up. Still, people only snuffed their fires with water or by letting them burn down. So, maybe the scientific principles behind it weren’t understood.
“B-but what about it, anyway?” Marie asked.
“Well, this is how normal fires work, but what about magical fires? I’m testing that out. What do you think will happen?”
“It’ll stay lit!” Marie exclaimed. “Yeah!”
“I think it will still go out,” Rose said.
Indeed, Rose would be correct under normal circumstances. These were not normal circumstances. I lit the candle by using Flare with my right hand. I put the cup over the top of the blue flame. When I raised the cup up, the fire…still burned.
Marie laughed. “Look! It’s still burning! Rose was wrong!”
“Yes, so it seems.” Rose shook her head.
Marie was more thrilled with her victory than Rose was despondent at her defeat. There was a hint of frustration in her voice, because deep down, Rose hated to lose. Marie hated to lose even more, though.
But I digress. The fire kept burning, even without oxygen. Normal fires required a heat source, oxygen, and a flammable substance to burn. In the case of fire magic, I previously hypothesized that mana functioned as a flammable substance, but under that assumption, the fire would still need oxygen to burn. This experiment totally contradicted my previous theory. Fire magic did not, in fact, require oxygen.
Did that mean that mana possessed both the properties of a flammable substance and oxygen? In my experiments with lightning magic, I found that mana conducted electricity. That led me to theorize that mana was a mutable substance, and that it possessed different properties depending on the energy type it contacted. Typically, this contact led to replicating and amplifying the phenomenon in question.
Now, I learned that oxygen wasn’t necessary for fire magic. In other words, mana replicated all of the necessary properties of a given phenomenon. Mana replicated the properties of fire after contacting it, regardless of the natural conditions. That would indicate that mana could replicate and amplify the properties of a phenomenon regardless of the surroundings conditions. It could light a fire in outer space, for example.
So why, then, did water quench fire magic? That seemed to contradict the theory, but maybe it had to do with its nature. In all possibility, water made fire magic weak. Could water function as some kind of designated counter to fire magic?
It wasn’t logical, that was for sure. I decided to put the water-fire interaction question aside for the time being. Regardless, fire magic produced by Flare had unique properties and effects. Using its flame had resulted in the unique properties of Elecsteel in the thundercite forging process. These fires were much more than just fires.
“Okay, so what does it mean?” Marie chimed in.
“Nothing yet,” I responded. “I just know that it’s different from normal fires now. But it should apply to lightning magic as well.”
At that moment, a lightbulb went off in my mind. I immediately shot up and raced to the center of the garden.
“I want to try something. Can you two cast some mana for me?”
“Of course,” Marie said. “It’s not much, but I can.”
“I can as well, but mine doesn’t last long. Marie has better control.”
I knew that even though the two of them could emit mana, the amount they ejected was less than mine, so it couldn’t support fires very well. If either of them tried to cast Flare, the fire would disappear within a few seconds. If I labeled my own emission capacity at sixty, Rose and Marie were probably in the twenty to thirty range. However, the two of them had a better sensitivity for controlling their mana that I did. Marie could manipulate it with the palm of her hand in complicated ways that I hadn’t figured out yet.
“I’m going to cast Flare in this direction and make it float there,” I said, pointing. “Marie, can you shoot an orb to collide with it? You can stand right there.”
“Sure, I’ll try.”
“And Rose, can you stand by with a bucket of water? Just to be safe.”
“Of course,” Rose said, with a hint of skepticism. “I’ll be interested to see what happens.”
“Yes, you will,” I responded. “Okay, let’s get started.”
Flare didn’t require oxygen or a flammable substance. Mana adapted the properties of both. If that was true, what would happen when you contributed even more mana to fire magic? Fire magic consumed mana. Mana contained all the properties of a flame. Therefore, I theorized that if I added more mana to my fire magic, the fire would become even more powerful.
I fired off a Flare into the air. It hovered there while Marie shot off her own orb.
What would happen? Would there be a sudden burst of flame? Or would the intensity of the fire increase? Would the color change, or something else altogether? I waited in anticipation for the outcome.