Lillene

Enjoy!

Serenity stared at Russ for a moment, then checked his body. It wasn’t something he did often, but he’d done it before; it wasn’t something that generally required much attention unless you were a healer trying to heal someone who was badly injured, but he knew he’d seen the normal pattern and it didn’t look like that. If he remembered correctly, the last time he’d examined his body, it wasn’t for his mana channels but for the equivalent channels for essence; they still weren’t shaped that inefficiently.

As he’d expected, his channels were clearly shaped to move mana and essence precisely and efficiently. Unfortunately, that didn’t disprove anything Russ had said; not only was Russ right about Serenity having learned magic originally based on the Skills the Voice gave, his body was that of a shapeshifter that was distinctly affected by his visualization of himself. Of course his channels worked the way he expected them to; he’d probably made them himself. 

Serenity paused, took another look at the diagram, and compared it to his internals again. Yes, they were quite different, but if he overlaid them, maybe he’d see something.

He didn’t. He kept feeling like something was there, but it just wouldn’t come into focus. There were too many extraneous bits; he couldn’t tell which parts were integral and which weren’t. Yes, both setups seemed to have denser areas and less dense areas, but they didn’t overlap very well. “Is this  the only way that it works or is it personal?”

Russ’s grin broadened. “Not something they taught at the fancy offworld Academy you went to?”

Serenity shook his head. “The structure was, but it’s basically the same for everyone and this isn’t it. But … they only taught the portion used for mana, not the portion used for essence, anyway. Don’t you primarily use essence?”

Russ nodded. “I did, but I use both now. They have very different uses; for body strengthening, essence is far better. For truly temporary effects, including controlling my mental shields, mana is better; I wish I’d known how to use it when I was younger.” 

Russ paused and looked over the map. He looked up at Serenity, then nodded to himself. “Here, I’ll draw both. What I’ll draw will be simpler than this, since it’s generic. There’s a lot of variation.”

Serenity watched as Russ quickly sketched a diagram. It wasn’t the same as the ley line map he had; that looked far more like a ritual spell circle than either the diagram or Serenity’s channels. It wasn’t until the diagram was nearly complete that Serenity was able to match it to either the map or the normal mana channel layout. It was somewhere in between the two, less complex than the map but still far more wasteful than the setup Serenity was used to. 

Serenity tapped the drawing over one of the largest discrepancies, an area Russ had simply shaded rather than drawing lines though. “Is this for a reason?”

Russ grinned at that. “I thought you’d notice that. It’s one of the areas that is the most common to be different in different people, and it’s the single most common area to change as you try to handle more power. Each of these is an area of mana storage; it has to go somewhere and these four places…” Russ tapped four spots in the diagram, including the first one Serenity called out. “Are the most common ones. Beyond that?” Russ shrugged. “I know what mine looks like because I have to work with it regularly to try to improve. If I were training you like a normal Guardian candidate, we’d have been working on yours for years now, so you’d know all this.”

Serenity frowned and glanced back over at the ley line map. “And yet it’s not necessary at all. It’s … something the Voice handles and we don’t even know about it?”

“I’m pretty sure that it’s what Tiering up actually is,” Russ countered. “So yes, something the Voice handles for you. It’s a lot easier than the way I was taught, but it wouldn’t work without the Voice. I think that might be why the Voice exists. I’ve noticed that the Voice builds on my foundation. It also counted me as Tier Two when it brought me to the Tutorial.”

Serenity gave Russ a sharp glance at that; he hadn’t known Russ was counted as a higher Tier from the beginning. It made him wonder how many other people were counted as higher Tier yet still put through the Tutorial.

“I didn’t mention it because it can’t be common,” Russ told Serenity. “Red was still counted as Tier Zero, and despite her flakiness she’s actually one of the best mage-artificers I know of. I suspect it’s the specific style of body-and-magic enhancement I did that made the Voice count me higher.”

“From what you’re saying, this has to belong to someone who uses that style of enhancement.” Serenity was fairly certain who it had to be, too. It had to be Apollyon. He sighed. “Someone who passed as a god thousands of years ago and today can summon a demon strong enough to give me a real fight. The demon wasn’t experienced; it could have been a lot worse. I guess that explains how the gods existed without the Voice.”

Serenity wasn’t even certain the ancient “gods” used faith energy the way modern deities did. If they did, surely they had to manage it in a way he didn’t have to; the Voice was probably handling that too. It made Serenity feel a lot less skilled to know that all the power he’d gained was based partly on an artificial tool designed millenia in the past, but at the same time he knew it didn’t devalue his achievements in his previous life. Very few people ever made it anywhere close to the Tier he’d reached; the fact that he had help from the past to do it didn’t change that. Others had that help as well.

He could try to learn all of this and do what the Voice did or he could simply accept that it helped him the same way it helped everyone else and move on with life. Serenity was confident he could learn it if he gave himself enough time, but he wasn’t certain there was a reason to. Realistically, if it required reshaping his body he should probably learn a little since he was a shapeshifter, but the details were probably best handed off to Aide or the Voice. 

When he thought about it, that made its existence make a lot of sense; it was a tool to make things easier, so that everyone didn’t have to learn the difficult method Russ (and probably Apollyon) used. Tool-using species like humans progressed by making things easier for people with the use of tools; the Voice was simply an incredibly complex, intelligent tool. It seemed to like what it did, too.

Serenity turned his attention back to the map. He could quiz Russ on the details of his progression later; he was interested and he might need to know to fully figure out the ley line ritual spell if it really was set up the way Russ thought it was. From what he’d seen so far, it was all too possible. “So, as for what the ritual does. It’s set up to be an enhanced version of a spell; whoever cast it knows something about spellforms, because that’s how the ley lines are arranged, rather than as a typical ritual. That sort of ritual spell is powerful but fast; you only get one go at it, and the power you put into it is what you get. It’s not my preferred type because of its limitations; it can’t do anything that really requires time. The fact that it’s using ley lines as the spell lines may extend that a bit, but that means we’re measuring how long it will last in minutes instead of seconds. Ley lines can be destabilized and these will be; once they’re destabilized enough, the spell will go up in smoke. Probably literally.”

“You’re talking about an explosion?” Russ didn’t sound happy about that at all.

“Mm, probably more like an implosion. I expect it to tear down into the planet as the lines try to twist and bunch. There might be an explosion at the end, as an energy release. However it comes out, though, it won’t be good for the area.” Serenity left the fact that it covered a significant portion of the east coast of the United States and a bit of Canada unspoken. Russ already knew that and he knew just how much of a disaster that would be.

“We have to … wait, why isn’t it already casting itself if the ley lines are all in place?” Russ clearly didn’t know much about ritual design and didn’t cast spells using spellforms. The reason was obvious to Serenity.

“The initiator’s missing. It’s like those wood things with the monster cores in the summoning trap spells - without them, it never starts. That’s done deliberately, so that it doesn’t start until you want it to. You have to leave out something important enough that it can’t start early.” Serenity had seen rituals where people didn’t set that up correctly and the ritual started up before they were ready, sometimes before it was completed. If you were lucky, you might have the chance to make another mistake, but that was usually in an Academy. Without someone on hand who was strong enough to halt the ritual and someone who could heal whatever damage the ritual did, it wasn’t generally a repeatable mistake. 

That didn’t really say much about the creator of the ley line ritual; if whoever it was hadn’t known to do that, they probably wouldn’t be around and there was a good chance that there would be a cooled lake of molten stone here instead of a prosperous country. The setup was old enough that even that might have been recovered, but Serenity was confident the ley line locations would be altered by something like that. They normally drifted with time; the fact that they hadn’t implied something was anchoring them in their current locations. Serenity didn’t know what to look for, unfortunately, unless maybe there were bits of World Core crystal there? He’d have to go check himself, but it might be worth it.

“I can recognize parts of the spell. It’s gathering mana … and essence, I think … into an area and then funneling it here. I’d swear I’ve seen something like that but it was a long time ago and it wasn’t a spell I thought I’d ever use. All I can say for certain is that it seems to stack up the magic then flood it into the area you’ve identified all at once. Given the size of the ley lines involved, the spell can almost certainly reach a mana level of above Tier Ten temporarily; it might even get up to Tier Fifteen. The thing is, I can’t tell what else it’s doing. There’s some sort of echo effect, so if that really is meant to represent someone’s mana and essence channels … is there any reason you’d want to flood them with far too much magic all at once for a short period of time?” 

Serenity looked up at Russ, hoping that the answer wouldn’t be “that’s how you Tier up.” Someone who was willing to kill this many people for a Tier … yeah, Serenity had met some in his past life. He could give himself at least that much credit; he’d never killed people for Tiers. Other reasons, definitely, but not for personal power. Personal survival was the most common reason and it was part of the reason Serenity was trying a very different approach this time.

Before Serenity’s thoughts could spiral too far, Russ spoke up. “Yeah. I don’t like the answer, but it probably explains the spell setup. I was about as strong as any individual could get before the Tutorial; there just wasn’t enough magic around to do more. You have to collect a lot of magic to get it to crystallize, and collecting it was almost impossible at my power, much less that of someone strong enough to summon something that could fight you.”

Russ was right. Serenity didn’t like that answer at all.

Lillene

The last time Serenity and Russ really talked about magic was before Russ went to the Tutorial. He had the experience to find out something Serenity didn’t have the background to look into: how personal magic with the Voice is different from magic without. It simply hasn’t come up since then.