Book 3, Chapter 25 (Patreon)

Our journey began at the teleportation platform. I’d made sure to fill the mana battery underneath to full a few days ago and swapped out all the emitters lining the platform itself for fresh ones in addition to topping off the ones in storage. That would leave more than enough mana for it to be used three or four times while I was gone, so no one was trapped inside the valley. If for some reason that ended up not being good enough, they’d have to pour their own mana into the spare emitters and swap them out.

Once we arrived on the platform halfway between Alkerist and Ghalin, I started scrying the area for monsters. We hadn’t ever shut down the waypoint nearby, so it was entirely possible the pass was still swarming with them. Fortunately, the closest monster I could spot was over a mile away. My scrying spells were quite thorough, especially now that I had so much more mana to put into them, so I was confident that there was nothing dangerous in the immediate area.

“How’s your shield ward?” I asked. “Fully charged, I hope.”

“Ye-eesss?”

I sighed. “How full is it, really?”

“Quarter of the way,” Senica admitted.

“I should make you fly without one, just so you’ll appreciate how important they are.”

“I know they’re important! I’ll put some mana in it tonight when we stop,” Senica promised. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Alright,” I said, not believing her for a moment. Oh, I was sure the shield ward would get fully recharged, but I was equally sure I would be the one doing it. I would have said it was a mistake to tell Senica what my regeneration rate looked like now, but the truth was I would have ended up doing it either way.

I was already going to be the one keeping us both in the air. Flight was an intermediate-tier spell by itself, one which Senica still struggled to completely master. She could get off the ground, but maintaining her concentration on such a complex spell for an extended period of time was beyond her, especially with the added difficulty of needing to draw mana from an outside source. Her core, even when full, didn’t have enough mana to cast the spell.

Fortunately for us, lossless casting was something I could apply to our flight magic. I estimated I could keep the spell going on myself indefinitely, and for two people, twelve hours straight would probably be my limit without dipping into a mana crystal. I spun the magic out, first on Senica, then on myself. She drifted up into the air, her arms waving in a futile attempt to keep her balance before her training kicked in and she straightened up.

“You should put that wand away so you don’t drop it,” I said.

Once she was ready, we flew out from under the overhang I’d hidden the teleportation platform under and took a second to orient ourselves in the correct direction. Then I took off, leading the way while Senica trailed behind me.

A few minutes later, she tried to shout something to me, but with the wind ripping past us, I couldn’t quite hear her. I established a telepathic connection between us and mentally projected, ‘What was that?’

She was so shocked by my thought popping into her head that she started to drop out of the sky. A second later, she regained control the borrowed flight spell and stopped spinning. I sent a burst of amusement through the link, one that only got stronger when she scowled up at me.

‘Slow down!’ she projected back.

‘Already? We’ve only just started.’

‘You’re too fast. Slow down.’

The spell itself determined our max speed, but it was an application of will to push myself there. If Senica’s willpower was flagging already, just a few minutes into our travel, I was going to have to reassess my whole timetable. ‘We’ll take a break at the eyrie,’ I thought back. ‘It’s only a few more minutes away.’

I got a jumble of frustration and annoyance back, not something my sister meant to sent through the link. I cut it before she could accidentally push any more of her emotions through, then slowed my speed down a little bit. She was still struggling to keep up, so I kept dropping down a bit every twenty seconds or so, just enough that she was still fighting for it, but not so much that she realized what was happening.

Holding the spell was good training for her. I’d thought her will was stronger than this, though. Perhaps I was being too hard on her, unfairly comparing her to some of the genius apprentices I’d taken on in the past. Their cores had been ignited at early ages and they’d received every conceivable resource and personal training for years before they came to me. My sister was a fantastic mage for her age, and I’d helped nurture that talent, but there was really no comparison.

By the time we reached the tower perched on top of the mountain west of Ghalin, she was visibly struggling. We were down to half our maximum speed, something I suspected was going to be our regular pace for the next few weeks unless I took over control of her flight spell. There was no deadline to this expedition, however, and the whole reason I was bringing Senica along was to help her grow as a mage.

“How are you feeling?” I asked after we landed.

“My head hurts.”

“We’ll go slower after the break. I suspect we’ll need to devote some time to practicing holding spells for extended periods.”

In all fairness, with mana as limited as it was, this wasn’t a skill Senica had really had an opportunity to practice. Now that my mana budget was near effectively unlimited, we had a good opportunity to address that. Even though I’d spent something like six times my total mana maintaining the two flight spells, I was really only down a tiny fraction.

Lossless casting was an excellent substitute for all my defunct techniques for harvesting ambient mana quickly, though it was admittedly significantly harder to grasp. Perhaps it would be easier for the mages of this era to learn since they didn’t have any old habits to break.

“Thank the ancestors,” Senica gasped out as she flopped down onto her back. “For the going slower part. Not for the extra training.”

“Nobody said becoming a mage was easy,” I reminded her.

“Yeah, but I thought you’d teach me all the special shortcuts so I could get good at it really fast.”

“You are ‘getting good at it really fast.’ That just means you have to work harder than anyone else because you’ve got farther to go. Unless you think you’ve reached your limit and want to give up?”

“No,” she said sourly. “I just want my headache to go away.”

“Ten minute break, then we’re going to have a lesson about reinforcing your willpower. Later on, I’m going to have you start practicing lossless casting.”

“I thought this was supposed to be a vacation,” she complained.

“I don’t know where you would have gotten that idea. Really, I would have thought you’d be looking forward to some instruction. It’s not often I tutor a single person.”

“That’s true, I guess. But not right now, Gravin. My head… I just can’t focus on something that makes me think.”

“Enjoy your break. We’ll start after,” I told her. While she did that, I started scrying out the path to the next waypoint. It wasn’t that I expected to find anything in our way, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. Besides, I had the mana now, so much so that I was still draining the excess into one of the giant mana crystals in my phantom space. Even with the inefficiency caused by linking so many of them to my core, I was still using them just to keep from wasting my regenerated mana.

Perhaps I’d make a new, huge crystal out of a giant boulder now that I had the capacity to do so. I could pick one out, shrink it down to fit in my phantom space, and work on when we stopped for the night. It would give me something to do while Senica practiced her own magic.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” I told her after my scrying spell found one that was the perfect size.

“What? Where are you going?”

I pointed off to the south. “Just a mile or so that way.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I have something I want to pick up. Just wait here for me, please.”

Then I was off, my own flight spell pushed to its maximum speed. I covered the mile of distance in under a minute and came to a stop, floating above a roughly circular stone with a twenty-foot diameter. As a rough guess, I suspected it was primarily made of common granite, but the fact of the matter was that when I was done, it wouldn’t much matter what the base material was.

It took me a few minutes to both shrink it down to a manageable size and reduce its weight to something that I could actually pick up, but once that was done, I hefted the now palm-sized stone and gave it a gentle toss straight up before catching it and stuffing it into my phantom space. The enchantments had enough mana to last for a month, so I had plenty of time to convert it into my most ambitious mana crystal to date.

Mission completed, I flew back to the tower where Senica was still waiting. “Welcome back,” she said dryly. “Thanks for leaving me stranded here.”

“You’re not stranded,” I said. “Even if I never came back, I’m confident you could find your way back to Ghalin, and they know how to get to the teleportation platform.”

“What about all the monsters, huh?”

“Didn’t you spend a few weeks hunting and killing the monsters around here? I’m sure I didn’t imagine that.”

“Well, you… That is, I- You can’t just…” Senica trailed off. With a sigh, she said, “I got first place in the competition, too.”

“Did you? Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, bewildered. That seemed like exactly the sort of thing she’d brag about.

“Didn’t seem important next to you discovering a species of gigantic magical birds and learning how to wield magic in a way that gives you unlimited mana,” she said.

“Hey, now. That’s not fair,” I protested. But the truth of the matter was that I’d known the competition was important to her, and I’d never asked how things turned out either. I’d gotten caught up in my own projects, which were admittedly more important in the grand scheme of things, but that excuse still felt a little thin.

“It’s no big deal. I’m used to it,” Senica said. “You’ve got a lot going on, can’t always spare time for the little things.”

“No, but…” I shook my head. “Look, I’m sorry. I should have paid more attention. But we’re here now; let’s make the most of it.”

“How’s that, more training?”

“We could talk about that farewell conversation you had with Juby,” I said, smirking. “Very tender. I didn’t know you felt that way about him.”

Senica’s face flushed red and her mouth worked silently as she tried to come up with some justification or denial, but nothing came out. After a moment, she managed to sputter out, “So, willpower training? That’s… uh, yeah, let’s talk about that. What are your recommendations there?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell our parents.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Senica said firmly. “And if you were going to make something up about anything you definitely didn’t see, I would just tell them that you’re lying.”

“Of course. Of course. My mistake. You weren’t holding his hand while you—”

“Ah! Ah, no, no. Nothing like that happened.”

“I suppose it’s none of my business if it did,” I allowed. “Now then, I believe we were about to discuss some techniques for holding channeled spells for an extended period of time.”

This was going to be a fun trip, after all.