It's currently just after sunrise, and I have several things I want to do today before I meet back up with the elves. For one, I need to finish that slime job before the deadline. I also have several spells I need to practice. I suspect that will take a while, given how high I'm aiming.
To master my concealment, I'll need to add a silencing spell onto my invisibility spell. I think I have an idea for how to do that, but I'll need Percivil's help. Next, I need a wide-range detection spell for other lifeforms. Unless the elves already know where the dragon is, that will be critical. I also have a couple ideas for that one, but they'll be trickier.
Most importantly, I want to experiment with flying. I can run fast, but as large as this planet is that's still not ideal for long distances. Human transportation is even slower, so I'd rather not do that. I actually think that this spell is a pretty sound idea in theory, but I'm wondering how it will go in practice within the limits of my magic.
My final idea is just more of a broken shot in the dark – teleportation. Being a physics nerd, I remember that this should be possible according to the theory of general relativity, but I only remember the qualitative parts of the theoretical support. I don't have high hopes for it.
Thinking about the appropriate order, I might need a silencing spell for some of the other tasks, so I'll head to the blacksmith first.
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When I arrive at Percivil's shop, the storefront seems empty, and I don't see Percivil. I guess he's in the back.
"Percivil! Are you here?" (Mizuki)
I call out, and after a second, he walks into the front with a smile on his face.
"Mizuki! Good to see yah. I bet you've got another crazy request, aye? You're welcome to just come for armor or weapon repairs yah know?" (Percivil)
He says the last part with a chuckle. I'm glad he seems to be in good spirits after last time.
"You guessed it. I actually need your help with a spell. Do you have a few minutes?" (Mizuki)
His eyebrows raise in surprise. Then, after another moment, he goes pale. What'd I do?
"Eh…Mizuki, it won't be destructive, will it?" (Percivil)
Ah, yeah, that's fair after what he saw last time. Sorry, bro.
"No, no, I promise. It's just a spell for stealth." (Mizuki)
That seems to make him relax, and he nods in agreement.
"Then, sure! What do yah need from me?" (Percivil)
I ask him to follow me to the same room as before.
"In a minute, I'm going to turn invisible. I need you to look closely and confirm that you can't see me even in this direct light. Okay?" (Mizuki)
He looks shocked at the suggestion, but nods in agreement.
I focus and cast my invisibility spell. Percivil lets out a yelp and his eyes go wide. I guess it's pretty weird to watch in real time. He comes close to where I am and starts looking all around intently. Then steps back and shakes his head in amazement. Without dropping my spell, I speak out.
"So, I take it you can't see me then?" (Mizuki)
"It's like you're not even there at all, incredible!" (Percivil)
So, he can hear me fine, as I suspected.
"Alright, Percivil, I'm going to try casting a silencing spell on top of this. Please raise your hand for two seconds if you hear anything from me." (Mizuki)
"You got it!" (Percivil)
He nods and crosses his arms in front of his chest. I clap once as a baseline. He raises his hand. Okay, good.
I close my eyes and imagine my magic forming a barrier around me, but not a skin-tight one, more like I'm inside of an egg that gives me room to breathe. Once the size feels right, I imagine the barrier reflecting air molecules it contacts to create a thin vacuum at the outline of the barrier. In theory, sound waves shouldn't be able to travel either way through such a barrier.
I open my eyes, and clap once. Percivil looks a little unsure, but then raises his hand. Damn, so it's probably muffled, but not perfect.
I focus more intensely on pouring magic into the thin barrier, willing the air molecules to be strongly repelled on impact with it. I clap once. Percivil doesn't react. I scream as loud as I can – still no reaction. Perfect.
I drop all the spells and smile at Percivil.
"Okay, that worked great. Thanks for your help, man, I'll let you get back to your work!" (Mizuki)
Percivil looks stunned, but he smiles back at me warmly.
"No problem, Mizuki, please let me know if yah ever need help like that again. That was so much fun to see!" (Percivil)
Alright, I think I can call it for that spell. There's the drawback that I also can't hear when inside it, and that I will run out of air if I keep the barrier perfectly sealed too long, but I can live with that. I only intend to use it in short bursts.
Hmm…maybe I should try teleporting from here to the clearing in the woods I was at yesterday? I wanted to try it eventually, and if it actually worked it would save me some time.
"Hey, Percivil, I'm going to try one more thing in here. Don't freak out if I disappear and don't come back today." (Mizuki)
He looks confused, but he voices his agreement.
I close my eyes and imagine the space around me. In theory, this should be like folding a piece of paper to connect two points, just in higher dimensions. I let my magic spill out into a sphere around me, and I will my magic to drag and entangle the very fabric of space itself. I imagine it pushing that fabric towards the spot in the center of the forest clearing.
At this point, I begin to feel a resistance, like the first time I made gold out of air. Like before, I try to brute force it with more magic. Eventually, it seems like the source of resistance 'tears', and I feel a sudden lurching sensation, followed by a pit in my stomach.
I quickly open my eyes and see that I'm falling towards the ground. I cast a reinforcement spell just before hitting the ground, but it still winds me a little bit. I sit there wheezing on my back for a few moments.
When I catch my breath, I look around and see that I'm in the clearing in the forest.
"Holy shit…I mean my aim was a little off, but that actually worked." (Mizuki)
From what I can tell, I was spat out about 15 feet in the air a little off-center in the clearing. So, not accurate enough to teleport into a room yet.
I practice teleporting via line-of-sight back and forth across the clearing. I have a few misfires, but over time I get pretty accurate. I'm not sure I want to risk teleporting into a tight space yet – I need to know the long-distance accuracy.
I confirm an exact spot to return to in the clearing by drawing an 'x' in the dirt, then I try teleporting to the spot about 10 meters outside the forest where I entered yesterday. Thankfully it seems roughly correct.
Taking a deep breath, I close my eyes to focus on teleporting back to the 'x' I'd marked inside the forest. I feel the typical lurching sensation, open my eyes again, and look down.
Bullseye. I can't help but smile to myself. I never expected it to work so well.
With my accuracy confirmed, I teleport back into the room I left from at Percivil's shop.
I was confident, but I still feel a flood of relief when I end up where I intended and not inside the wall or floor. Looking around, I don't see Percivil, so I call out for him. After a moment, he comes running back in.
"Woah, Mizuki, you were gone for quite a while. I thought you left. Were you invisible this whole time?" (Percivil)
Eh…probably best not to freak him out with the truth. Instead, this gave me an idea for my trip into the forest.
"Something like that! Hey, listen, do you have anything small and basically worthless that looks really important?" (Mizuki)
Percivil stares at me in confusion. Yeah, I didn't explain that well.
"Like, a small sphere of colored glass that doesn't actually do anything and you won't miss. Or something similar." (Mizuki)
"Aye, actually, I have some small blue spheres that were originally going to be a part of magic weapons I was designing." (Percivil)
He's obviously confused why I am asking.
"Can I have a few of them, please? I promise they're for a good cause, and I'll explain it to you one day." (Mizuki)
He just shrugs and walks over to one of the boxes in the room, then digs out something in his palm. Inspecting them, it's just as he said – like three blue marbles. This will work perfectly for what I have in mind.
"Thanks, man, I owe you even more now! Alright, see yah!" (Mizuki)
With that I teleport back to the center of the clearing. After returning, I turn my attention to the next skill I'll need – detection.
First, I need to confirm if I can get my magic to react specifically with certain substances or objects. I pull out one of the marbles and place it in my left palm. Then I will my magic to form a string between two of my fingers on my right hand, and I slide it over the marble.
As I anticipated, the space between my fingers passes through the marble as though there's nothing there – it's like a marble on an invisible string. However, I know that magic must be able to react with matter when you will it to, based on some of the spells I accomplished.
Next, I place my right index finger on my palm a few inches away from the marble and will a 'web' of magic to spread out from my finger in all directions until it's large enough to touch the marble. Then I imagine my magic reacting with the marble and pulling other parts of my magic towards it.
Nothing happens at first, but as I keep visualizing it, I eventually start to feel a 'pull' around my finger. The pull isn't physical, but more like a sense that my magic is being called somewhere.
Then, I take the three marbles and throw them into random spots around the clearing. I close my eyes and picture a magic web spreading out a kilometer in every direction. Despite the scale, it doesn't feel like a strain at all.
Then, I will my magic to react with the marbles as before. After a moment, I feel my magic being pulled in three directions.
I can't tell exact distance, but the 'force' of the pulling decreases with distance, so I can tell relative location for now. I open my eyes and walk towards the three locations I sense – sure enough, I find all three marbles.
Next, I need to get a sense of the scale and distance. I teleport back to the edge of the forest and drop a marble, then to Percivil's back room and drop a marble, then back to the clearing.
I expand my magic web and periodically check for a marble reaction, until I sense both. I'd guess the second one is almost 25 kilometers away, and I barely feel any magic consumption making a magic web that big.
After playing around with different marble distances like this for about an hour, I'm able to instinctively gauge the approximate distance and location of marbles with this 'magic sense'.
Okay, now to try something else. I think this is a good time for slime hunting.
I activate my body enhancement and full concealment skills, then start sprinting off into the forest. Getting lost doesn't really matter anymore now that I can teleport.
After a few minutes of running, with periodic release of my silencing spell to recycle the air, I see my first slime. I walk up close to it with concealment and search for its core. There.
I pull my dagger, drop my silencing spell, and slice into its core in a clean motion. The slimy part sort of dissolves, then I pick up its fractured core.
I place it in my palm and tune my magic to react with it like I did for the marbles. Then, I use magic sense. I feel probably fifteen reactions around me within 5 kilometers.
I spend the next twenty minutes running around slaughtering slimes until I have the ten cores that I need, then I teleport back to my clearing. I drop off the cores in my pack, then turn my attention to the last necessary thing on my agenda today – locating an Elder Dragon.
How can I use magic sense to locate something I've never been able to tune to before? Finding another Elder Dragon to tune to first would be just as hard, and I'm betting parts of it for sale are rare to nonexistent. I also don't have that kind of time or money.
Hmmm…I wonder if I can make my magic react with other magic? It won't be very specific, but if I can tune the sensitivity of the reaction, I might be able to slowly sort out things with magic power above a certain threshold. I'm assuming that Elder Dragons are basically as powerful as it gets.
Fortunately, I'm now familiar with the sensation of magic, so this should be relatively easy to tune. I spread my magic sense in all directions until I start to feel moderate strain on my magic reserves. Then, I imagine my magic reacting with other magic.
For a few minutes, it's to no avail, but then I'm suddenly flooded with a swarm of reactions pulling me in every direction. I'm so overwhelmed that I gasp aloud and break the spell.
Well, that sucked.
Eventually, I begin again, but this time I'm prepared for it and grit my teeth. I close my eyes and imagine the reaction between my magic and others' slowly becoming weaker, like I'm partially releasing the spell.
After a little time, I feel the number of reactions start to drop off. I keep lowering the sensitivity until I can discriminate the actual number of reactions to around ten. They're mostly in the city.
I spend about half an hour trying to get the initial sensitivity to where only the strongest presence shows up from the start. After a while, I can do this reliably.
Now, time to try making a dragon radar.
I face deeper into the forest, then spread out my magic sense to its very limits in a roughly sixty-degree arc. I activate magic detection at the highest level I detected earlier, and I am once again overwhelmed by number of reactions. I slowly drop the sensitivity until the number of signatures is manageable. They are still too numerous to finely discriminate, but I can estimate that the furthest signature is around 400 kilometers away.
So, this is my upper range huh? Not bad at all. Honestly, I'm shocked, but I'm sure that using an arc instead of a circle helped a lot to extend the range of my magic sense.
I slowly start lessening the sensitivity again until I detect only two presences – the number of Elder Dragons that there are supposed to be. I sweep my arc back and forth several times but don't detect any other presences, then I greatly narrow the arc to maximize its range, and I repeat the sweeps.
Still, only those two presences are detected. I don't know exactly how deep the forest is in that direction, so I can't be sure I'm getting the whole region, but those are probably the two Elder Dragons. Nice.
Now…which one of them is the earth one, and which is the wind one? Also, they are both around 300 kilometers away in different directions, so getting there would be a serious problem. I'd guess it'd take weeks of hard hiking to get there with those elves slowing me down. No way am I doing that.
I could try teleporting with the magic sense as a guide, but in a dense forest I'm likely to teleport into a tree or something around the signature. Nope, high speed flight is going to be necessary here.
This is, of course, a separate issue from how I'll get them there without tipping my hand too much, but I have an idea for that.
"Okay, time to learn to fly!" (Mizuki)
My idea for flight is to basically fine-tune gravity control around my own body. So, it's not so much me flying, as it is me falling in abnormal directions, but that's not important.
First, I need to try actual gravity manipulation as a general spell. Since it's a form of spacetime manipulation, like teleporting, I think I can do it.
The marbles should work nicely for testing this. I place one in my palm and hold it out in front of me. I will my magic to fill the space within and around the marble, then to 'grab' the spacetime that permeates it.
When spacetime is normally distorted by excessive mass, the gravity decreases with the distance squared. However, I don't want to start dragging other nearby objects in with my gravity spells. So, I want to warp spacetime less gradually, so that gravity distortion drops off almost immediately outside the target area.
I close my eyes and focus on the space just on top of the marble. I imagine that space being distorted – the sensation is kind of like trying to compress the space itself with my magic. At the same time, I focus on forcing the other surrounding spacetime to maintain its normal shape as much as possible.
As I continue to focus on the spell, I feel the familiar magical resistance that lets me know I'm on the right track. Per usual, I push through it until I feel the marble start to become lighter in my hand.
I open my eyes and continue increasing the opposing gravity until I don't feel the marble's weight anymore. I drop my hand, and the marble starts to slowly sink. I increase the opposing gravity a little more, and the marble is basically floating now. Great, now to move it.
Keeping the existing gravity balanced, I add gravity towards the front of the marble as well, and it begins to move. I continue playing around with this until I can zip the marble around how I want with good control. It's pretty fun – kind of like flying a toy helicopter.
Alright, time for me. I begin the same process on myself, and I start to slowly feel lighter. Pressing on, I eventually float up. Rather, it feels like I'm falling up. I quickly readjust so that I'm just floating. I spend a while playing around with controlling the speed and accuracy of rising and falling until I'm comfortable with it.
Now, how should I fly? Belly down, like a superman, or standing up, like I'm sky surfing. Hmm…maybe feet first.
Whichever direction I'm flying is going to replace the feeling of gravity and falling, so superman style would be like standing on my head. That would not be good. Feet first would be the most natural sensation-wise, but that would be terrifying visually. So, sky surfing it is!
I float up above the tree line, then add my invisibility spell. I don't want any prying eyes. Next, I look over my right shoulder and start accelerating that direction with my flight spell.
"Ahhhhhhh!" (Mizuki)
A startled cry escapes me. As I started going faster, the wind kept twisting my body off balance and I ended upside down.
Tch…I totally forgot about that. I 'swim' my way back upright, then think for a second. I need a barrier that takes all the wind resistance in my place.
I create a teardrop-shaped magic barrier that repels air like for my silencing spell – I recall that teardrop shapes are supposed to be good for aerodynamics. I make it so the barrier is larger and fully encloses me, but I alter it so that it still has an opening behind my direction of motion. I want to have air exchange to breathe.
With the adjustments made, I begin accelerating again. Now, there is basically no feeling of air on my body, just the sound of turbulence behind me. I'd say the handling of the flight spell now feels very much like sky surfing.
As always, time to push my limits.
I rise above the tree line and it's chilly as the air thins, so I use my magic to heat the air molecules in my barrier. Honestly, with all these spells required for practical flight, you'd need insane power like mine.
I begin accelerating towards a point on the horizon. As wind resistance on my barrier increases, so does magic consumption. I keep accelerating until my body is under strain from magic consumption and my reserves can be felt dropping. I'd guess I could maybe fly for two hours under these conditions.
I'm high up, so it's hard to gauge my speed by looking at the ground passing below, but I know it's an absurd pace. I turn my flight towards where the dragons were and pulse my magic sense to detect them. Okay, about 350 km in that direction.
I adjust my course and press on for what feels like 5 minutes, then pulse the magic sense again. Roughly 280 km away now…sooo…holy shit. That's like 800 kph! I knew I was fast, but that's beyond expectation. Okay, I think that's all for now.
I simultaneously release all my flight related spells while teleporting back to the clearing. I grab my belongings, then teleport back to Percivil's shop. To avoid another encounter, I adopt my full concealment spells, then exit his shop discreetly.
When I'm sure that nobody is around, I drop my spells and make my way to the guild. I arrive around noon.
I walk into the guild, and it is bustling with activity as usual. I thread my way to the reception desk and give my standard greetings to Melanie.
"I'd like to report completion of this slime job, and also pay my yearly fees." (Mizuki)
I pull out a silver coin as well as the ten slime cores, then hand them to her for inspection. She nods and smiles after a minute, then walks into the back. A moment later, she comes back with my reward money, not that I need it. I pocket it, and she flashes me a proud smile.
"Congrats on your first job completion, Mizuki!" (Melanie)
"Thanks! By the way, how do I rank up from G to F?" (Mizuki)
"For that transition, you just need to complete three jobs with the guild!" (Melanie)
Easy enough. Alrighty then. That's something to focus on when I'm done with the elves.
I give Melanie my thanks and farewells, then make my way back outside. When I feel unobserved, I duck into an alley and discreetly teleport back to my clearing in the forest.
I gather my weapons and pack, check my equipment, and confirm the direction of the nearest Elder Dragon with a pulse of magic sense. Everything seems to be in order.
A satisfied smile spreads across my face.
"Now then…let's go meet an Elder Dragon!" (Mizuki)