I had only just managed to read Kevirn when Ynqths dropped a massive tome with golden lined pages on me, titled "Pyrosphaera; An Academic glimpse into Ubiquity." in overtly fancy golden lettering.
It was an entire thousand page study on Fireballs, supposedly detailing its mechanisms and the three variations one might encounter, although one of the only interesting things I could find in there (which was commonly a baseline understanding in arcane studies) was the inverse squared diffusion law, where a human's (or similarly sentient creatures) field would naturally diffuse a pure magic missile to ambient background magic (based off kQq/r^2, or as we say, rocket science). Frankly, the equation part was pretty hard to understand since I was incredibly rusty (equations barely existed in my old job since we used computers for that). If anything, instantaneous brain-blasting wasn't something wizards could do.
"Well I wouldn't worry much about the equation anyway. If an arrow's heading towards you I doubt you'll be very interested in judging how much armor you should have put on to stop it completely. The important thing about this equation is that everyone can diffuse magic, so that's why mages encode their spells through elements, to at least make sure that the arrow is still flying in your general direction."
"Huh… where I came from it was just a matter of magic being magic."
"And anyone can make pseudoscience about something that hasn't been proven. We're probably 500 years younger than your world, so it's a given that magic just becomes a useful excuse for people to say some political bullshit about the 'nature of things'. I get enough of that bullshit from those fucking Elves who think women can only be clerics when my job is a Martial Golem Engineer."
"So Elves exist here."
"Yeah, Elves exist and they're all dicks."
"That's… kind of strong don't you think?"
"Actually I think it's kind of too easy to hate on them once you actually engage with them. They're naturally condescending and love to butt in to your every conversation because they need to be included in every issue on the planet. In short, they're Imperialist dicks who also have very small dicks."
"I kind of get you… although I don't really want to go there since I don't really know enough about it myself."
"Ech… I'll keep to the science. In any case, the second thing to keep in mind is that, generally speaking, affecting this entire room would be a very impressive feat."
We had been studying in Ynqths' Golem forge, a sort of blacksmith room that was fairly spacious outside of the large, deep sand pit that burrowed what could have been an entire ten meters further underground. Still, any shonen manga character probably had enough power to really mess this place up in a single "power of friendship" attack as soon as their origin story ended.
"Since Elik's Diffusion Law is proportional to the spell's surface area and- uhhhh…. You know what, either make sure the spell comes out really fast or it has a low surface area and you'll do fine. To be honest I shouldn't really have slapped Pyrosphaera on you since you're a shadow user and stuff."
"Wait, then we did this for nothing?"
"Look I messed up a little and was going to head into how you're a Shadow user but then I got sidetracked a bit by talking about Elves being dickheads so cut me some slack here. In any case, Shadow is pretty useful when it comes to, you know, being stealthy, but otherwise it's not very useful for everyday tasks."
Ninja. Shikata ga nai yo ne?
"I've got Ingrid's Introduction to Shade Realms here." Ynqths said, pulling out a much smaller and unassuming book that had a small amount of dust in its pages.
"Shadow magic in general is pretty complicated and gets into the same sort of trouble that Runic does in that sometimes a light mistake, often literally involving light, can cause some serious problems. Ingrid herself became crippled after about forty years of using Otherside Mirror when she fell from a tree from her house in a dumb bet. I mean, vampires can regenerate but pain fucking hurts."
I guess that's an actual drawback instead of something dumb like reality being at risk and 'don't be a naughty boy'.
"If anything I'd recommend learning Black Fire and Maiden Step. They're both fairly simple, the former being a decent jet spell and Maiden Step allows you to do some dirty things if you want."
…
"Oh come on! You're a virgin! I'd highly recommend it in fact, since you never know what girl gets turned on by a shadow quietly coming up behind her and ploughing her. Some of them find it very hot in fact."
"I don't want to learn about your damn fetishes."
"Oh they aren't only my fetishes, but in my fifteen years here I've heard plenty of things from the girls about how they want their husbands to go even harder~"
"YNQTHS THINK OF THE CHILDREN!"
"If they do, then they'll learn that everyone gets off from something really weird, like slime or threesomes. Most of the problem is that no one knows who they'd feel comfortable doing that weird stuff with, or even if they figure out their kink at all."
…
"Virgins will be virgins I guess."
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