Chapter 7:
Aqua
I CONTINUED MY EXPERIMENTS ON COMPOUND Magic in earnest. Allow me to provide you with a brief list of the techniques I discovered.
Structure of Compound Magic
Mana + Mana = Compound Mana
Increases mana volume and density. Activation time: Instant.
Compound Mana × Flare = Twin Flare
Flare cast with compound mana. Superior version of Flare. Activation time: Instant.
Flare × Mana Eject = Bomb Flare
Flare that contacts raw mana. Brief, but powerful. Activation time: A few seconds.
Compound Mana × Flare × 2 Mana Ejects = Double Bomb Flare
Flare explodes by repeated Mana Ejects. Very powerful. Activation time: six or more seconds.
Compound Mana × Bolt = Line Bolt
Bolt cast with compound mana. Superior version of bolt. Activation time: Instant.
Bolt × Mana Eject = Reduced Power
Due to air resistance, Mana Eject interferes with the electrical current. Useless. Activation time: Instant.
Flare × Bolt = Separate spells.
They activate separately while not interfering with one another. Activation time: Instant.
Those were all the types of magic I tried out the other day. The first name to appear is the base spell, and the second one to appear is the sub spell. I activate the base spell with my right hand and the sub-spell with my left. Most of these are impossible to do with just one hand.
Today, Marie, Rose, and I sojourned to the nearby lake. The scene was a familiar one—this was where it all started. I hadn’t been here in a while, though, since I didn’t have a reason to visit anymore.
“Wow, I sure missed this place. It’s been two years,” Marie said.
Two years? Was that all? Somehow, the years had been so packed that it felt like even longer ago. Two long years ago, I first learned about magic here when Marie showed me the Etten trout emitting orbs of mana. Today, I used several kinds of magic myself.
Surely, this was a miracle. Sometimes I wondered if any of this had really happened. But, without question, I existed and wielded magic. I became the magician that I’d dreamed of for so long. Still, I had a ways to go on this path.
I walked up to the lake’s surface and stooped down to look at the water.
“What are you going to do, Shion?” Marie asked.
“Knowing him, surely something magical,” Rose said.
“Yep,” I replied. “There’s something I want to try out here. But first, I need a simple confirmation.”
I stared down into the water. I couldn’t see the bottom, but I tried to stare as deep as I could. Naturally, that didn’t get me very far.
I saw something shining in the water. It was faint, but definitely there. Even outside of mating season, Etten trout emitted a faint light from their skin—just like people who possessed mana.
I hadn’t been able to see it before, but as I trained more with magic, I began seeing mana more clearly. I didn’t know for certain, but I thought now I could pretty much see whenever something or someone had it. So even when the trout weren’t emitting the orbs of light, I could still see their power.
I was interested in confirming this, since a few days ago, on a trip to Istria, I swung by a different lake. There, the Etten trout didn’t have mana. That meant that those trout were different for some reason. Why did some Etten trout have mana, but others didn’t?
It was the lake. This lake, so close to the house where I was born, was special! Was it just a coincidence? Or was I born here for a reason? Maybe it wasn’t worth thinking about. It wasn’t up to me to know the truth of fates or destiny or oracles.
“Is that a light down there?” Marie asked.
“It is! It’s just as I thought, the trout in this lake are special. Is it the fish or is it the lake itself?”
“The other creatures in this lake don’t shine,” Rose said. “So, it must be the trout, no?”
“Maybe, but not necessarily,” I said. “Remember, some people have mana while others don’t. Just having mana on its own is worthless unless you know how to make use of it.”
“What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “That’s why we’re here today.”
I took off my boots and stepped into the lake. I walked in until the water reached my knees. There, I turned my right palm face down toward the water. I used Mana Eject to create a mana sphere and sent it through the lake’s surface. The mana passed through without effect. The mana orb glowed underwater, but before long its light faded away.
Nothing seemed unusual about this. All I could see was the orb of light going from the air into the water. The water didn’t even resist the mana; it passed through as if it were one and the same as the air.
I had already tried this before. At the time, I had assumed that mana had no effect on water. Was that really true? I began doubting it.
Those doubts began when I realized that what I had actually observed was mana interacting with the atmosphere. All the properties I thought were of the mana itself were actually amplifications of the natural properties of air. Mana turned into fire when it touched fire, and it turned into electricity when it touched electricity. Following those patterns, it was only natural to assume that mana would take on the properties of water when it touched water. I expected that it would start to float and become more viscous than the air. Why didn’t that happen?
I lowered my arm into the water up to my elbow. I released mana directly into the water. I commanded my mana to release from my hand and float up to the surface. What appeared was the exact same mana as what I casted into the air previously. It sailed smoothly and quickly up into the sky and vanished. The mana had the exact same properties in the water that it did in the air, even when it was touching the water. I didn’t get it at all.
I’ve got to think about this deeper, I decided.
Mana in the air is exactly the same as mana in the water. Did that mean that mana adapted air’s properties before it even touched it? Had I been wrong this whole time, and my initial assumptions that mana naturally glowed and floated were correct? Or did mana naturally take on the atmosphere’s qualities without needing to touch it directly?
No, I needed to slow down. I was rushing. In mana’s reactions with fire and electricity, the natural properties of air played a role. With fire, it played the role of oxygen; with electricity, it played the role of air resistance. It made more sense to assume that mana was in fact taking on the properties of the atmosphere as it contacted the air. Mana didn’t act like fire or electricity until it actually contacted either, after all.
Maybe, when I released the mana underwater, it was reacting with the properties of water in some way, but no, that wasn’t right. The mana behaved the same when I released it into the air, both before and after it touched the water. It didn’t change when it moved from underwater to above water, either. Unlike the cases of fire and electricity, there was no change in water whatsoever. What did that mean?
I knew that I could cast spells by combining two pieces of mana together, but what was the Compound Magic of air and water? The atmosphere does naturally have water in it… Maybe above water and underwater weren’t different enough to change its mana properties? That could potentially explain why it didn’t change even when passing from air to water, and vice versa.
Obviously, the atmosphere and water interacted with each other in various ways. Air could cause water to evaporate, depending on its heat. It could also cool the water down, with lower air temperatures even freezing it. Those reactions happened according to changes in the atmosphere, so maybe it wasn’t unfair to consider the properties of the atmosphere and water as similar enough.
I remembered my attempts to touch my mana to rocks, trees, and other physical objects. When it came to these kinds of impermeable substances, I could only observe how the outer surface reacted with the mana, but I never noticed any sort of change. Nothing at all. I needed to find a new approach.
To start, I decided to activate my mana underwater. I issued the command: “Lift up the water.” That propelled my mana up toward the surface. More complicated mana commands required more mana to start up, so I couldn’t issue a particularly large load of mana with an order like that. I just needed to see if the mana could interact with the water at all. That was it. Could mana move water? Surely, I could find the answer.
I issued the commands. And…the lifting mana caused a splash of water as it lifted out of the lake and disappeared into the sky.
“Huh? Did that water just move?” Marie asked.
Rose nodded in agreement. “Unless you just splashed the water, Shion?”
“Nope, that was the mana. I ordered it to lift up the water.”
“Hang on,” Marie gasped. “Mana can do things to water!”
“Yep, looks like it,” I said.
“Th-that’s amazing! That’s a major discovery!”
“Now you’ll be able to use water magic too!” exclaimed Rose.
“Hm, well, probably. Hoo hoo.” My cheeks scrunched up in a grin, but I couldn’t cut loose yet—there was still a long way to go.
The girls had observed correctly, but the mana didn’t exactly lift the water up like I wanted it to. Instead, the surface water tension burst and it caused a splash. You couldn’t exactly call that water magic.
Next, I decided to try using Compound Magic with the same command. This resulted in a ping pong-sized ball of water rising up a few inches above the water’s surface before dropping back into the lake.
“It floated! The water—it floated!” Marie shouted, splashing through the lake and grabbing me by the shoulders.
“It did…float…ugh… Marie…stop…shoulder shaking!”
“Calm down, Marie,” said Rose, who had joined us in the lake and pulled my sister away.
Marie blushed. “Uh, sorry. I just got a little carried away.”
My ear canals rang from the aggressive shaking. I took a few deep breaths.
“You don’t usually get this happy for me, Marie,” I said.
“Oh, well, you were always experimenting with scary stuff like fire and electricity. I like water magic much more; it’s so fantastical and pretty.”