Isekaied Into An Eroge, Time To Have Fun!-Chapter 49: Real Magic
Finding the magic proofed training grounds was easy enough, though upon entering them I was reminded again that I was a poor commoner who really didn’t have a lot going for myself just yet since the four other people here all had a wand or staff, and one even had a monster skull with a giant crystal ball lodged inside its now empty cranium.
The reason I was reminded that I was so poor was a simple one; you could cast spells with just your hands, yes, but the mana wasn’t as concentrated and potent if you did it that way, so every single mage worth their salt had some sort of tool to help focus their magic.
Technically the Focus that had been ’left’ to me was something I could use, but only if I used raw mana and nothing that was attuned to an element, which was where all the power was; so I didn’t actually have anything to use, but that was okay.
I was here to learn and then train, after all, so doing it completely unaided would hopefully benefit me more than if I had something to help me cast these spells easier... and really, if I barely knew how to cast spells anyways what good was a wand going to do for me?
The training grounds were large enough that I didn’t need to worry about distracting these other four people nor was I worried about potentially hitting them should something terrible happen as I tried to cast some spells.
Misfires were sort of expected - at least for me, since I had never really tinkered with magic before yesterday - so I went as far away from them as I possibly could get, which was secluded enough that I could hear myself think despite the amount of spells being lobbed down the range.
Training dummies of all kinds were waiting to pop up should you need them, and their immensely enchanted bodies were capable of tanking most hits that us students could dish out, meaning we had a perfectly suitable area to train all sorts of things.
Of course practical application was still the best way to learn what spell was good and which one needed to be forgotten about, but until we got comfortable enough to delve into the Dungeons we would instead spend our time here.
Selecting a simple target roughly ten feet away from me, I took a breath and just selected an element that I should be ’attuned’ to at random, which seemed to just default to fire in my mind; when I thought of offensive magic I thought Fireball, and that seemed as good a place to start as any, right?
So how was this meant to work..?
Thinking through it logically and going step by step helped me rather immensely, so I began to go over everything from the ground up so that I could follow it as best I could and try to understand how to perfect it.
Casting spells required either a healthy dose of imagination and creativity if you wanted malleability or a more rigid, clinical thought process that had only the desired outcome; both had their pros and their cons and each worked better for different people.
Even if I was going about this logically I don’t think the more strict nature of it would benefit me since magic was always something I viewed as ’fluid’, meant to bow to the whimsy and mind of the one casting it.
But I did need to start by being rigid to a certain degree since I had never once cast a proper spell in my life; the methods for doing so were a bit known to me but they were going to require trial and error... which I suppose is the entire story of my time when I was playing this as a game.
So if I wanted to cast a spell revolving around fire I was going to need to do a few things first; the most obvious was gathering mana inside of the hubs on my shoulders so that they could begin to trickle down my arms and into my hands.
During that time I also began to imagine fire in it’s entirety, ranging from the gorgeous red and orange bundle of energy that cast an equally beautiful glow all the way towards its incredible heat and capability of destruction through burning.
Visualization was a key part of what made magic work, since casting a spell was just shaping your mana into something using your will and mind; in this case I wanted to take the mana inside of my hands and turn them into flames.
Making sure I had enough fuel for those flames took a moment, but when I was ready I began to feel it immediately in my hands; a warmth spread swiftly before tiny sparks flew from my palms, signaling that the mana inside was beginning to react to what I desired.
Converting raw mana into one that was attuned with an element seemed like it should be harder but really it just took a bit of visualization and the belief that it would work; simple enough to just convert it, but controlling it was where things actually got tricky.
As of current there was a ghostly blanket of flames covering both my hands, barely visible but definitely there since there was a noticeable heat being emitted from my hands, however it was beginning to get hotter and somewhat intolerable the longer those flames remained on my hands.
So converting the mana in the hubs on my hands was tolerable but trying to wrangle it to do what I wanted needed more effort, but leaning into what it was fundamentally meant to do made it somewhat easy.
Leaning into the destructive nature of fire and ’promising’ it that I would let it do just that was enough to stop its spread up my body and instead begin to take shape between my palms as I imagined it becoming a sphere.
It started out wimpy, barely a golfball in size and comprised of translucent yellow flames that almost flickered out of existence, but with a little more effort and concentration I stabilized it into a yellowish orange ball that sizzled... not so menacingly.
That could be worked on though, so although it looked a little pathetic I was rather ecstatic that it had happened at all; maintaining its shape and looking towards the target in front of me, I took a deep breath before pushing the Fireball forwards, watching as it sailed through the air at a snails pace.
When it collided against the chest of the target it did explode, which was a positive, but instead of a nice chunk of the target getting damaged it was merely slightly charred and disheveled... which was not a positive.
But it was a start, even if it was just a slow one; summoning up another Fireball was easy enough, and this time I gave myself a few seconds to funnel more mana into it before throwing it forwards, noticing that there was a correlation between how I cast it and how fast it traveled.
Before I had just pushed my hands forwards, but this time I had brought my hands to my side before twisting myself back into place, using some more momentum and treating the Fireball between my hands like a solid object.
That increased its speed and sent it soaring towards the target with far more juice than the first time, and as such it had much more impact as it collided with the target’s chest, creating more of an explosion and burning more of it than before. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚
Still not enough to actually be a reliable ’weapon’ against someone, but definitely an improvement from before, one that gave me hope that I might learn how to actually wield this against someone in maybe an hour or so.
For today I was just going to start with the Fireball spell and nothing more since my mind was a little mushy thanks to Kha’Miero, but the fundamentals that I would learn from this was nice; the knowledge that converting raw mana into an element was merely a few seconds of thought was nice, and the simplicity of shaping said mana into a spell seemed easy enough as well.
Giving it enough power was a different story, since the third time I tried to cast Fireball I put just a little bit too much power into it that caused it to get a little out of hand; the flames began to lap at my hands again and the heat became unbearable, so before I could get damaged or do something stupid I just tossed it at the target.
That was a fair bit more explosive than the others, but the dangers of harming myself in such a way was definitely a cause of concern and made it abundantly clear that I needed to work on control more than anything, but this was a good start.
