The summer sun was low and red. a hair above the city skyline, when I went out. I headed alone into the backyard garden, where in the past flowers were grown for no special purpose but the sheer pleasure of looking at them. Or maybe the flora had been set up as a psychological weapon, another venue to flaunt the family's prosperity to select guests.
Plants were framed in artistically arranged, geometric formations in the field along the length of the main house, punctuated by small statues on high marble pedestals and neatly trimmed cypresses, as if on a sheet of musical notation.
The crowning feature of the gallery was the fabulous hedge maze. It wasn't a true labyrinth in its dungeonesque meaning, as in an obstacle to trap intruders. The dwarf box lines were sheared low enough that you could peer over the walls only by raising your chin a little, and finding a way through from the entrance to any of the three exits took less than a minute, not days. It was more a show of green thumb and aesthetic sense.
The garden as a whole had seen its better days.
Why invest in it when the owner wasn't even there to look at it?
The gardeners' job these days was merely to see that the pathways stayed clear and the backyard didn't turn into a jungle. Otherwise, the site looked more like a salad bar for trolls than a work of art, the plant species freely mixing in their beds, growing irregularly, the weak mercilessly suffocated and dried up.
But I wasn't there to please my eyes.
Only after the day's cramming was done could my real work as a mage begin.
In the middle of the maze stood a round, stone-framed fountain decorated with a generic statue of a Sylphid sitting on a stumpy pillar. Water gushed out of a long, fluted horn in the water spirit's hands, the hidden pump system powered by a simple rechargeable crystal.
I chose this spot as my temporary workshop.
Magicians typically favored enclosed spaces in their study. For privacy reasons. Caverns, castles, dungeons, towers, and ancient ruins. The harder it was for outsiders to reach, the better. Style may have been a factor too.
But the nature of my magic made constricted spaces a safety hazard. In open air, without buildings or other people nearby, the risk of a cave-in, or somebody being hit by debris was smaller. The bushes and trees of the garden still covered the view somewhat, so that it wasn't too easy to spy on what I was doing.
Magic had to be consistently used to make it stronger. Even after becoming a Tier 8 magician, I didn't skip practice for a day. The sudden decrease in capacity made holding onto the routine more vital than ever before.
The black dragon rings obstructed mana flow to an agonizing extent, but if I let that get me down and sat still doing nothing all day, their effect would cause my circuitry to atrophy. It was possible I'd turn into an ordinary person over time.
Maybe that was the big plan all along? But I wasn't about to give up so easily. No matter how painful, I had to get used to working with the rings and preserve my ability.
"Let's see…"
For now, let's start over from the basics. Never neglect the basics.
The casting process typically followed the same three steps:
Grounding. Secure a good footing without obstacles that could cause accidents, and an upright posture. Mages conducted very potent energies, after all. Being suddenly unbalanced or distracted in the middle of casting could end in a disaster. A mage wasn't somehow immune to their own power. Channeling. The power of mages arose from within the world itself. The caster was effectively a receiver that collected and redirected the energy drawn from the planet. That was also why the positioning mattered. You couldn't project a good singing voice either if hunched. Casting. Assign the energy a form and function, and release it. Knowledge, visualization skills, and strength of will were vital ingredients in this. And then, if all went well, out came ice or fire, or wind, or whatever under the sun.
Most mages had an inborn elemental affinity, a bias factor that automatically imposed certain properties on their magic. In layman's terms, it was often called just "talent," though that was a bit misleading.
The affinity could be both an advantage and a disadvantage. It made that one element much easier to cast, with improved effects; conversely, it made elements conflicting with your affinity significantly harder to use. But normally, that was an issue solved by time and training.
There was a so-called neutral alignment too.
I was born without a fixed elemental affinity. In its place, I had an equivalent, artificially induced condition that was a lot worse. My spirit was etched with a magic framework designed to enhance two specific properties at the expense of all else.
Those properties were painfully simple: enforcing a vector and velocity in a spell.
The output of any and every technique that involved moving an object was greatly amplified, as if there was another mage casting the same spell with me. This method bypassed the natural bottleneck of mages, which was having abundant energy but not being able to fully use it due to mental shortcomings. The human brain hadn't evolved much from its hunter-gatherer roots and struggled to grasp events exceeding the scale of day-to-day life.
Simply put, my role as a war mage was to shoot, and the purpose of the Schemata was to ensure I couldn't hold back. All the energy committed to a spell would always be spent to ensure maximum yield, so that the shot went in the intended direction at the highest possible speed.
The definition of the "bullet" was variable. Most of the time, I used only air as ammunition, since it was available everywhere and spared me the effort of conjuring dedicated materials. It wasn't emptiness surrounding us, but a thick mass of particles invisible to the eye, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc, and that soup had quite a hefty mass. When it was launched fast enough, the inertia and momentum were deadly enough to kill. No solid matter was needed.
But this trait came with the same downside as the natural affinity: it couldn't be turned off.
Being carved directly onto my soul, the Schemata were permanent.
If a spell I wanted to cast didn't include a ready reference for direction and speed, random placeholder values would be automatically added. That made stationary phenomena uncontrollable. Rocks broke. Flames couldn't retain heat. Ice boiled. Electricity lost charge.
Nothing I could do about that.
The Mysterium researchers didn't think I'd ever need to cast anything besides attack spells, so it was an acceptable trade-off for them. If leaving out safety and control mechanisms allowed offensive power to be increased by 0.02%, then it was worth it. And I personally agreed.
But being a one-trick pony was sure to cause problems at the academy. It was the main reason why I didn't want to go, really. I'd only make a fool out of myself among common mages. But the decision was already made. I could only make do with what I could actually use.
My ability didn't get in the way so much with spells that dealt with motion.
One less hazardous application was what I called "faux telekinesis."
I couldn't adjust the strength of techniques directly, but I could tone them down by lowering the initial mana intake. If I kept the feed weak enough, my ability wouldn't launch things explosively into the atmosphere, but would find a shaky balance against gravity and air resistance…
…And objects in the affected area could float quietly in place.
This wasn't strictly "true Telekinesis," which conjured a static control net and could be manipulated freely like a real limb. The difference was like holding up a cup in your hand and blowing at it hard enough to lift it. It was such a stupidly wasteful method, nobody else would even think to try it. But I didn't have a shortage of fuel.
As a beginner, I practiced by juggling primitive shapes like marble balls or toy cubes. I wouldn't return to a level that basic, though. Handling solid objects was child's play. As long as you identified the center of mass, such a rigid object could be held up indefinitely with only one contact point and fixed input. Magical manipulation couldn't get easier than that.
A bigger challenge was controlling fluids.
Water was an unforgiving element that loved to humiliate mages. It took simultaneous control over multiple contact points and a lot of mana to uniformly cover a wider area without leaving gaps. Any weaknesses in the execution would cause the water to drain away, allowing no cheating.
Such an advanced training method was fit for an expert like me. So I faced the fountain and the water spouting out of Sylphid's horn, raised my hands, and began the process I'd repeated a million times before and more. In my normal state, I could've scooped the whole pool off the ground without even trying, but weakened by the rings, it was better to temper my expectations.
For now, I'd gather about a bucketful and hold it airborne for, let's say, ten seconds.
It was appropriate to have small, clear goals in experiments.
"..."
The instant the water arc made contact with my extended magic "hand," it shot skyward in a snappy, fuzzy jet, drawing a fuzzy rainbow over the pool.
Too much energy. The mana flow felt so weak, I overcompensated. I tried to lower the intake, only to slip into the other extreme. The water ran over the control region faster than I could collect it, fell over, and missed the pool. The spray landed on the walk path, and I had cold water splashed over my nightgown. Its cold bite seeped through the cloth, gnawing at my leg and side, and distracted me enough that I lost control and the spell fell apart.
Swearing, I tried again and again, continuously tweaking the power flow and area of effect, but couldn't nail the sweet spot of holding the water in place. Either it fell through a gap somewhere, or went flying. All I did was sprinkle the flowers while feeling like a fool.
Finally, I let my hands drop and leaned on my knees to catch my breath. Damn. Exhausted after barely ten minutes at it? When was the last time I had to try this hard? Not even when I was first learning magic. A Tier 2 novice could've done better.
I glared at the ugly black hoops clinging onto my left wrist.
It was even worse than I thought.
If they just lowered my overall mana capacity, that would've still been tolerable, but their effect wasn't stable. They caused irregular, noisy fluctuations in the flow that made maintaining a regular output almost impossible. Not like a steady filter with a fixed effect, but like a thousand tiny gremlins that gobbled up mana mouthful by mouthful, when and how they pleased.
The rings seemed somehow tighter than before.
Did their donor's spirit still live in them? Was this revenge for all the wyrms killed by human heroes over the ages? We weren't going to be friends, me and these things. No. They were an actual menace. One way or another, I had to get rid of them.
"Tch…"
Was it really only the rings' fault?
I wasn't only making up excuses, was I?
I was so used to playing with unlimited quantities of mana, never worrying about the small details and compensating with brute force where problems appeared, now the chilling suspicion began to sneak into my mind…Was my fine control actually terrible all along?
Maybe I really needed to go to school.
At that moment, a stern voice spoke up behind me.
——"Hey. Who are you?"