I stepped out of the bathroom, rubbing a white towel through my damp white hair with a another towel looped around my hips.
Droplets of water ran down my pale skin and toned physique. My cheeks and hands pink from the heat of the bath.
The sweat from the earlier experiment thoroughly washed off, and my natural masculine smell returned.
I strode over to the closet and wore black and red imperial tunics. I admired myself in the mirror for a few minutes, making comments about my otherworldly handsomeness.
When I was done admiring myself, I summoned Masenshi, moved pure mana into it and made five identical copies appear.
The copies flew through the air as I effortlessly controlled them with my mind.
"Damn." I muttered, still coming to terms with the fact that I gained a skill without moving up a realm.
This is an unprecedented case, something that never happened in the past, according to my knowledge. There was no records of such a thing in this or the library in Arx Immortalis.
"Haaa." I sighed, not sure what to make out of it. "I should rest a bit before going to Isa."
I jumped face first towards the bed, my eyes closed and arms spread wide.
-Thud
Instead of the fluffy heaven that I expected, I made contact with the marble floor.
"Ugh... what the fuck?" I groaned, confusion displayed on my face.
"Hihihi." I heard the childish giggles of Isadora coming from somewhere.
I sat up on the floor, and there she was; seated on her office chair, laughing at me without trying to hide it.
"Sister." I playfully growled, my voice low. "Explain yourself."
"Relax." She said, still laughing. "I wanted to show you something."
"There's other ways you can go about it." I said, stepping closer, my barefeet soundless on the spotless marble floor. "What is it you wanted to show me?"
"This." Isadora turned serious, pointing towards something on her desk.
I moved around to her side, and got a better look of what she pointed to.
Her desk was a complete mess. Papers were scattered on it, notes, drawings and ink stains on them. There was also mana stones of different colors, some big, some small and some broken.
"What am I looking at?" I asked, acting as if I don't see the mess.
"This." Isadora picked up a small blue mana stone and showed it to me.
"What about it?" I asked.
A wisp of pure mana moved from Isadora's finger towards mana stone. The stone absorbed the mana greedily.
A small magic circle appeared on the stone where the wisp of mana entered.
"You see that?" She asked.
"The magic circle?" I asked, still keeping my gaze on the mana stone in her hand.
"Mhm." She nodded. "I have a title called [1/4 of the Children of Mana] and it allows me to 'change the properties of magic circles'."
"Okay." I nodded, eager to see where she is going with this.
"This is a standard mana stone that stores a bit of mana and once someone crushes the stone, the mana will enter the core of that person." She said, cutting off the mana supply to the stone. "But what if you change the property of the magic circle to do something else?"
She made another two wisp of mana. The first entered the stone, activating the magic circle. The second moved underneath the magic circle and projected a larger version of the magic circle, making its details clearer.
Isadora raised the other hand, but this time the hand was giving of a golden glow. Her hand moved to the runes in the magic circle, took hold of one rune, removed it from the magic circle and threw it away.
The rune broke down in particles and vanished.
My jaw dropped.
What Isadora did was unheard of, nowhere in history could someone or something make contact with magic circles. Your hand or the object would simply pass through.
And here she was, grabbing a hold of one of its runes and throwing it away.
But Isadora wasn't done yet.
She removed a couple more runes, and drew new runes in the place of the ones she removed. I didn't study runes, so I had no idea what they meant.
She did the same with some of the lines in the magic circle, erasing them and drawing different ones.
"Done!" She excitedly announced.
"Now, watch this." She removed the second wisp of mana, making the larger projection of the magic circle disappear.
She accelerated the mana output into to mana stone.
Once the mana stone was full, she dispersed her wisp and threw the stone towards the marble wall.
-boom
A small explosion erupted when the stone shattered against the wall. The wall was completely fine, because the explosion was too small to cause any sort of damage.
My eyes widened when I realized all the possibilities of what she just did.
"Imagine what we could do if the magic stone was bigger." Isadora said, her eyes shining in delight. "We could make so much bigger explosions."
"You're right." I smiled at how enthusiastic she was at the thought of blowing something up.
"But that is not all." She hurriedly added. "A thought struck me: the description said I can 'change the properties of magic circles', right,?"
I nodded, even though it was a rhetorical question.
"So, doesn't that mean that I can 'change the properties of magic circles' when other mages cast their spells? That is entirely possible, but then we have a problem." She said, eagerly explaining.
"The distance." I said.
"Exactly." She said. "Mages cast their spells from the backline, which is too far away from me since I need to make physical contact with my glowy hand in order to change the magic circle.
But what if I don't need to touch the magic circle?"
I raised an eyebrow at her question, but I didn't interrupt.
"You see, when mages casts a spell the magic circle immediately appears, but the spell doesn't activate immediately because you need mana to charge up the magic circle in order for the spell to go off.
And if I want to 'change the properties of the magic circle', I need to disrupt the flow of mana. But the only way I can disrupt the flow of mana, is if–"
"–you know which spell is being casted." I finished her words.
"Exactly!" She said, enthusiasticly. "I need to figure out which spell is being casted in order to disrupt the mana flow and to make the mage's spell void. And I need to do this before the magic circle finish charging up.
Now I know what I need to do and what result to expect, but the questions remains: ..." Isadora looked at me, expecting me to finish her words.
"How?" I said, amused.
"Exactly!!" She exclaimed. "I have no idea how I'm going to do that. And that's when I decided to called for outside help.
I enlisted Mila and told her to cast a few spells but to cast them as slow as possible, so that I can closely observe the relationship between the magic circle and mana.
After a couple of agonizing minutes and intense research, I finally figured it out–"
"Mana particles." I said.
"Y-yes. Mana particles." Isadora was shocked, not expecting me to know the answer. "How did you know?"
"I'll tell once you're done with your story." I said.
"Oh, right." Isadora realized she was getting off track. "Mana particles. But not just any mana particles, the particles must be same as the affinity used in the magic circle.
This is the easy part because all the affinities have their own distinct color of mana particles. Blue particles for Water, green for Life, orange for Fire, brown for Earth and so on and so on.
And since Mila casted a magic circle with the blood affinity, I had to use the red mana particles. I connected these particles to each other and formed a long crimson thread.
I then used this thread not to disrupt the mana flow, but to disrupt the magic circle itself and that is when the real magic happened." She said with twinkling eyes.
"Ding!" She mimicked the system sound with her mouth. "I got a system notification and this notification said that I gained a new skill."
My eyes widened for the nth time today, it seemed that the world chose to throw surprise after surprise at me.
"And boy, what a skill it is." Isadora continued. "It is called [Magic Circle Disruption] and it is S-grade and it allows me disperse any magic circle, if I can figure out what spell it is before it is casted.
I'm amazing, right?" She looked at me, waiting for praise.
"You sure are amazing." I praised, patting her head.
"Mhm." She purred, but quickly pulled away. "Now, let's quickly go level up so that I can increase my perception in order to figure out the speel of an enemy that is far away."
"Alright. But let me first put on some shoes." I said, looking down at my barefeet.