Deciding not to prolong the conversation, Alexander turned to all his friends and ignited a small flame in the palm of his hand. Without stopping at the achieved effect, he extended his other hand and created a tiny tornado on it.
Allowing them time to appreciate what they saw, he simply stood there for a while before directing both the fire and the tornado upwards. After flying a short distance, they predictably disappeared.
"And what was that?" Sergei was the first to come to his senses.
"Magic! I just want something, and by visualizing it as accurately as possible, I make it work."
To prove his words, he picked up a stone from the ground, cleared it of moss, and threw it into the hands of two comrades standing opposite, two parts of what was once a single stone. The smooth, polished surfaces indicated where the stone had recently been whole.
"I just imagined cutting it with a laser, but without visualizing the effect. Try it!"
Sergei immediately stared at the piece of stone in his hands and then screamed, dropped the piece, and put his finger in his mouth. The air smelled of blood. When he pulled out his finger, everyone saw that the tip of his index finger was missing, and the wound had a very clean cut.
Watching this, Konstantin held up his half of the stone with the cut facing upward and stared at it. After a second, a small flame ignited on the smooth surface. Then the flame moved from the center to the edge, circled the stone's perimeter, and returned to the center, where it detached from the stone and hovered in the air, three centimeters from the surface.
Without saying a word, Sergei and Yevgeny lit fires on the tips of their fingers.
"I was hoping it would happen like this," the young man sighed with relief.
"How exactly 'like this'?"
"That we're all mages. Not just me."
Until the very last moment, the worm of doubt gnawed at him. What if he was special? Various options were possible, and he really didn't want there to be as few mages among the vampires as there were among humans.
"Now we can throw fire like the mages in that battle the sergeant remembered?"
The sergeant of Orod was once a participant in a small but extremely intense battle in which mages played a decisive role. Then, over the battlefield, there were not ordinary "fire arrows" flying, but "fireballs"; "fire rain" poured in several places at once; a couple of enemy squads were burned in a "firestorm." The royal troops of Orod, supported by the archmage, suppressed the rebellion of a certain count.
"But we can't do it like that," Alexander created a fireball in his hand and threw it. As before, it disappeared as soon as he moved away from the person.
"It seems that we are like those paladins — not 'real mages,' but personal ones."
"We'll see about that now," Konstantin created a ball lightning in his hand and sent it flying.
The ball slowly flew a short distance and dissolved in the air, like the previous spells, leaving no trace. But Kostya (Konstantin) didn't look disappointed.
"Interesting. Sasha (Alexander), go grab a twig."
Obeying his friend's demand without objection, Alexander picked up the first twig he found on the ground.
"Now stand and hold it vertically."
Konstantin stopped half a meter from the twig and focused on its tip, pointing towards the sky. A spark ignited there. The twig caught fire.
"Put it out," Kostya (Konstantin) said.
Alexander extinguished the fire. The experimenter took a step back and focused on the twig again. The flame flared up again. Without waiting, Alexander extinguished this fire too, and his partner, in the meantime, took another step back.
This time, nothing happened. No matter how hard Konstantin tried, he couldn't ignite the fire. Neither could anyone else present. Through small experiments, they found that the area in which they could influence objects and perform magic was a sphere with a radius of about one meter.
Within this volume of space, they could do almost anything, but beyond its limits, they couldn't do anything. It also turned out that magical abilities were not "free" — Konstantin, who tried out a huge number of different magical techniques, from combat to household, became very hungry after 30 minutes and had to go hunting, leaving his colleagues to continue training with their newly acquired abilities.
Returning twenty minutes later, he was full of energy and ready to cast spells again, with a fox carcass in his hand.
"Girls for a fur coat," he joked.
"You're not a fur trader; do something else," Yevgeny insisted.
It was necessary to find out whether any "special" energy was spent on spells or whether the blood provided enough. In response, he received a whirlwind and a tornado, along with a flying animal corpse.
"Indeed, everything's fine. Hunger manifested quite strongly; apparently, I spent all the energy from the blood on spells, but now I'm fine."
Yevgeny, satisfied that everything was indeed normal, decided to end the experiments.
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