'How much of magic engineering I can still remember, I wonder?' Leon thought to himself. He then failed to stop a grin from creeping up on his lips.
This sentence was nothing more but a joke popular in the academic field. After all, forgetting about magic engineering was considered to be impossible after the ordeal of the course one had to go through to properly learn it!
'I wonder what local magicians would think after seeing me use magic like this,' Leon then thought, gritting his teeth at the mere thought of the idea.
The bloodmancer could still recall his colleagues from the academy days who boasted what they would do if they somehow appeared in the medieval period. How they would bring enlightenment to those who still considered magic to be something sacred, divine, and secretive.
And to be frank, Leon himself went through a phase like that as well. The difference between him and his past colleagues... was that his brutal life soon knocked some sense into him, forcing Leon to abandon those stupid thoughts and focus on the bloody reality.
'I was the one who grew up from those dreams the fastest, and here I am,' Leon thought with a snicker decorating his face. 'In a world where magic still appears to be this mysterious, spiritual thing.'
Leon shook his head.
There was no use reminiscing about the good and bad of his past. It was all gone the moment he pressed the detonation button, turning himself into nuclear ash along with the world's dictator and what was left of the capital.
And whether he liked it or not, now he had to make use of his knowledge in a way that wouldn't expose its extent to the locals.
'I cannot get overboard,' Leon thought, staring down at the short spear of his own making.
In the eyes of Bactrian, it was a destroyed piece of what used to be a useful and simplistic arm. Yet, in Leon's vision, this crude weapon was but a mere foundation for what it was about to become.
"Magic engineering is the most I can do, after all," Leon muttered under his nose, using his own voice to keep himself company.
He was adept at all three levels of all three main schools of magic. Out of the three of them, he specialized in bodily magic, granting him the ability to use its supreme form, blood magic.
And then, roughly a year before what was supposed to be his day of death, Leon reached the peak of magic, becoming one of the few absolute magic in the entire whole world.
A great accomplishment for someone not even nearing his thirties.
And yet...
'Inner magic would take way too much mana that I don't have while I can't risk using bodily magic without the right instruments,' Leon quickly weighed his options.
And just like that, he crossed out two out of three schools of magic, one of which being the one he was the most adept at.
'Absolute magic... It's out of the question as well,' he thought.
The very idea of reaching for his greatest ace card during the very first mission he got in this strange new world filled Leon's soul with repulsion.
'And there is hardly anything to automate with this level of equipment.'
Leon released a deep sigh. Yet, rather than despairing over his situation, he shook his head and even went as far as to slap his own cheeks.
"Nothing good will come from sulking around," he lectured himself out loud. "So let's get to it," he then added and closed his eyes. 'But first...'
There were, in total, three schools of magic, special rank magic for each of the schools, and then the absolute magic that reigned above them all.
And then, there was the basic magic that was so simple and crude that no one in the academy was shameless enough to consider it a part of their school.
But that didn't mean this simplistic usage of mana couldn't be beneficial.
Leon extracted half of all the mana he conjured back near the village. He guided it along his veins, making sure to not interrupt the structures already embedded into his very being. And then, once he could feel the activated mana surging to the palm of his hand...
Leon simply allowed it to scatter around in a wide circle with him at the center, forming the thinnest type of fog that could exist in the world.
A fog so thin only someone actively observing the flow of mana could ever hope to even notice.
'That should be enough,' Leon thought, blinking his eyes a few times to get rid of the momentary daze the simple spell brought upon his mind.
He wasted nearly half of his mana by infusing it into the air around him. And the only benefit of doing so was that he could now perceive any and all distributions to its flow.
'And now that I won't be interrupted...' Leon thought, bringing his eyes down to the weapon in his hand again. 'Let's get to work!'
First, came the primary level of the construction magic school. The Array magic.
Using the other half of his mana, Leon slowly carved small runes into the wood of the spear, organizing them into neat circles.
Rune after rune, circle after circle, Leon covered the entire surface of the handle of his weapon with magical markings, each of which infused with a strictly measured amount of his own mana.
"If I do this, it will connect with that and enhance those two..." the bloodmancer muttered as he allowed his passion for tinkering around to get the better of him for a moment. Then, his attention moved to the blade of the spear.
It was made from a simple, crude iron. Yet, for how low the quality of the metal was, it was still far tougher than any wood one could make the handle with.
But what was the surface of a metal to the power of mana?
In the end, Leon took an entire hour ever since entering the forest before he finally brought his short spear up to his eyes.
"That should work," he muttered, a look of satisfaction showing on his face.
"Now, for the engineering proper..." he whispered, gulping down his saliva.
Just invoking the name of the second level of construction magic was enough to make him instinctively swallow down. A habit he developed while still in the academy as one of the subjects of the torture called magic engineering course.
Writing out magic arrays was simple. As long as one remembered just a few basic runes, they could turn them into practically any kind of order. Yet, all the simplicity would vanish when connecting two or more arrays would come into play.
The difference in difficulty was so great this seemingly small step gave birth to a whole new level of the school of magic. And without a doubt, save for construction magic ultimate form of life magic, it was the most profound type of construction magic as well.
"As the number of magic arrays grows linearly, the complexity of the whole picture grows exponentially," Leon recalled the popular catchphrase of the course before starting to connect the arrays anyway.
In theory, relying on simple magic arrays was enough. No one would expect a crude weapon like the short spear to be able to easily penetrate boulders or shoot magic all on its own, after all.
Yet, Leon was stranded in an unfamiliar world where everything could potentially be hostile.
'Skimping on preparation is the domain of the naive,' Leon thought, gritting his teeth and dedicating his entire attention to the cumbersome task at hand.
In the end, the bloodmancer took an hour to draw the arrays all over the surface of his spear. Then, it took him another hour to connect the circles, despite the number of runes necessary for that being lesser than a single percent of the total.
"It's done," Leon released an exhausted sigh as soon as he completed his job. His body then slumped down while the spear itself fell out of his hand.
In spite of the power that it now commanded, the weapon fell to the ground... and did absolutely nothing.
Courtesy of the safety lessons Leon's professor imprinted on Leon's hands.
The bloodmancer took a minute to rest his mind. Yet, as soon as the stinging feeling under his eyelids passed, he opened his eyes again and picked the weapon up from the ground.
Leon then stood up and took a deep breath. Then, he laid his eyes on the uninviting darkness of the deep forest right before him.
"I guess I should go in, don't I?"