Norman and Kalia stepped out of the teleporter along with his guards.
It was Norman’s first time in California. Honestly, it was much like he imagined, only with fewer cars. If it wasn’t for electric vehicles, he doubled there would be more than a handful of working cars on the road. However, the lack of cars could also be due to the secure location where the teleporter was housed.
A man walked over and offered his hand. “Lord Norman, the Admiral is attending to some last-minute work but he will meet you at the restaurant. I will be your guide and driver.”
He shook the offered hand and followed the man to a blacked-out SUV. He couldn’t help rolling his eyes as the man opened the armored door.
“Is this really necessary?”
“The Admiral insisted we treat you with the utmost respect.”
Norman sighed, not bothering to correct the man’s assumptions. He was referring to the necessity of having an armored SUV as a ride rather than any disrespect he might have felt. Any spell he was concerned about wouldn’t be stopped by simple armor plates. Heck, Norman knew of at least six spells that could either punch through the armor or bypass it entirely. Unless it was enchanted. And he knew by Kalia’s lack of interest in the vehicle that it was not.
It wasn’t concern over his or Kalia’s safety. They were both wearing his newest generation of armor amulets. Ones designed to automatically deploy if they sensed any danger to the wearer as well as enchanted by Kalia. He was pretty sure this new design could take a tank round without the person inside suffering more than a mild bruise.
Even if someone could get past the protection, there was always his backup phylactery. Which was safely hidden nearby thanks to Grobert.
He had tried to convince Kalia to be linked to one of the devices, but her stance on killing another to save herself was firm. He could respect that, even if it annoyed him. Unfortunately, he couldn’t perform the same trick he used to get rid of her censure with the phylacteries. Her refusal just meant he had to be extra vigilant that she wasn’t hurt, or taken. If Norman couldn’t at least do that much, he should probably go live as a hermit somewhere and stop calling himself a lord.
The trip to the destination didn’t take long with the lack of traffic, something he was immensely grateful for. The vehicle felt like a rolling coffin to him. Soon the pair exited their ride outside a swanky-looking restaurant. It was the type of place he couldn’t have afforded to even glance at back in his pre-collapse years. Not that they would have let him in spitting distance of such a high-class place back then anyway. These sorts of places were usually run by people who threw vast amounts of cash at politicians and police to keep people like him away.
As he exited the SUV, he glanced around. He was surprised by how normal everything seemed. It seemed this part of Southern California was firmly stuck in the pre-collapse era. At least from what he knew of California. The weather was nice, and there were people out and about going on with hardly a care. Norman found it a bit weird. Almost like he had stepped out of the future and into the past. It was almost as if everyone wanted to deny the world had irrevocably changed. Or maybe they had finally grown used to it?
A far too fake-looking woman with bleach blonde hair and a body only plastic surgery could produce walked them to their table. It was a testament to how much Norman had changed over the years as he barely even glanced at the woman. The superficial beauty on display here just didn’t register for him anymore.
“Well, this place is quite something,” Norman remarked, trying to distract Kalia from nervously glancing around.
“It’s a bit too much, don’t you think?”
He reached over and gave the woman’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “It's fine. Just the Admiral showing his thanks.” Truth is, the Admiral could have shown his thanks with a less notable venue. But Norman couldn’t pass up a date night opportunity like this.
Norman had asked her out because he wanted to have a nice date with her as well as get her out of her workshop for a bit. Both of them tended to overwork but taking a break now and then was important.
The two didn’t order any food right away, but they did get drinks. They both sipped their wine until the Admiral finally arrived.
“Apologies for being late,” the man spoke.
Norman rose and shook the man’s offered hand. “Admiral, I don’t know if the two of you have met, this is Kalia.”
“Yes, Miss Sorento. We have actually met, briefly at Lord Norman’s coronation and once prior.”
Her smile turned into a frown, “Prior? You knew my father, didn’t you.”
“I wouldn’t say I know him,” The Admiral replied, seeing her expression change. He released her hand and sat across from the pair. “But I am aware of his work due to my position in the military.”
“I assume that means he is still alive,” she asked through pursed lips.
The Admiral glanced toward Norman before turning back toward Kalia. “…As far as I’m aware. I’m sorry if I brought up a sore subject. I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s fine, Admiral,” Kalia let out a breath. “You couldn’t have known what my bastard of a father had done.”
Norman cleared his throat, not wanting their nice outing to devolve into something that would leave a bad memory in Kalia’s mind. “Admiral, what did you wish to speak about? There isn’t an issue with the refugees, is there?”
“No, those are fine. Even if we took them all, three thousand people is a drop in the bucket compared to the population here. And we can always use more seasoned soldiers. I asked you here because the jorik and Fariken have brought up some concerns about this latest collapse. Although the fariken might just have mentioned it to look like they are on top of things, you’ve met Cho Klu’klik. She’s pretty typical for their race. But don’t let their tempermentality fool you, they are quite advanced as far as races go. They just don’t like to share with others.”
“Ok? What does that have to do with me?”
“Eh… they wanted to get the gron’s opinion on the matter, seeing as they have been around far longer than the other races.”
“Ah. And they need me to set up a meeting?”
The Admiral nodded.
“I’ll see what I can do. But it may take time.”
“That’s all I ask. Now, I’ll let you two enjoy your meal. The bill is on me, so don’t worry about it.” The two thanked the Admiral as he got up and left.
“We can do this some other time,” Norman suggested after the Admiral left. He knew her father was a sensitive subject.
Kalia took a deep breath before responding. “No, it's fine. I won’t let my father ruin another day for me. He has taken enough of those already.”
The pair ate and chatted, but Norman could tell Kalia was still upset over the mention of her father. He could relate to having shitty parents but at least his parents had only left him. What hers did was a thousand times worse. He racked his brain for a way to get her mind off of her father when an idea struck him.
“I heard you were making progress on your new project?”
She beamed up at him before launching into detail on what she was working on. “Well, we had a breakthrough in the resonant frequency needed to convert stored mana into electricity. It turned out we needed multiple overlapping resonances to break down the stored mana into usable energy. Our early tests are rather crude but with each test we are improving the conversion ratio.”
Changing the topic had been the correct choice, Kalia really came alive when discussing her work. And he loved to see her excitement. “That’s great! When did this happen?”
He was truly impressed by her and the other enchanters' work.
While there was a lot of overlap between spells and enchantments, they weren’t the same. Spells were more like the programming and enchantments were like the hardware. Although that analogy was crude at best. If spells were programming, it was programming that only worked once and had to constantly be rewritten every time you used it. He supposed the permanent spell circles were a closer approximation to programming. But they were still limited. If you wanted to add magic to a building, wall, or city, you needed enchantments.
“A few days ago,” she shrugged. “I didn’t want to make a big deal about it until we had a working prototype. Speaking of which, how did you hear about it anyway?"
Norman chuckled. “You might not want to make a big deal about it, but Saliu couldn’t help talking Nolia’s ear off about the accomplishment. And she in turn complained to me that all these breakthroughs were driving her bonkers.”
Kalia giggled at that. “I find that hard to believe.”
He smiled. Norman knew full well that Kalia would never believe the prim Finance Administrator would ever have complained about her mate or used the word bonkers. But just imagining it was enough to get her to smile, so it had been worth it.
Although he did hear about the project from Nolia, it only came up in a conversation asking to increase the funding for the enchanters. Something he had gladly accepted once he learned of their breakthrough. Getting working electricity for the entire town would be a game changer.
The rest of the night flew by as they chatted and shared stories.
“You didn’t!” Kalia exclaimed.
“Yup, had to walk all the way home in my birthday suit. As you can imagine, I didn’t stay friends with those kids after that.”
Kalia giggled at Norman’s story from when he was still in grade school. It was when he went swimming at a local pond and the so-called friends at the time were jealous that the popular girl liked him and not them. So to take revenge they stole all his clothes. In hindsight, the dare to go swimming buck ass naked was dumb. But he was a stupid kid, as most kids are. The funny thing is he hadn’t even liked the girl they got so upset about. If he remembered correctly, he thought she was rather mean because of how she treated those same friends.
Despite the sour mood toward the beginning of their date, the evening turned out quite nice. He hadn’t shared half of what he did tonight with anyone else. Most of what he told Kalia was so embarrassing he would rather forget it. But telling her felt right. He knew she wouldn’t judge him for it like some of the other women he dated in the past.
Norman was tempted to ask the Admiral where Kalia’s father was, just so he could retrieve the man and beat some sense into him for treating Kalia this way. But he quickly dismissed that idea. While it might bring him some joy, he doubted Kalia would see it that way. No, it was better off if the man was simply forgotten. The only thing that would change his mind is if Kalia asked him personally. And he doubted that would ever happen.
Before he knew it they were back in Ashvale and he was standing outside her shop slash house with his guards standing a respectable distance away. He wished the night could have lasted longer.
“Thank you for tonight, Norman. I had fun. And thank you for taking my mind off my father. That was sweet of you.”
“Was I that transparent?” he asked with chagrin.
“No,” she smiled before leaning in to give him a kiss on the lips. “I didn’t realize what you had done until the ride back.”
While Norman wanted to go in for a second kiss and see where the night led, he held himself back. “Until the next time then,” he gave her a bow and kissed her hand.
She giggled again and fanned herself with exaggeration. “You best go.”
He smiled and waved at her one last time before walking away, happier than he had been in a long time.
***
The next few weeks flew by. Norman mostly kept busy with his projects and running the city. Although he still made time for Kalia.
By this point, the city could pretty much run itself. He only chimed in when it was something important. Which was happening far less often now that tensions had settled along the border and with the Council.
Even the worry over the Empire turned out to be overblown. Everything his spies reported said they had no clue the Third Prince was dead. The worst thing that happened to him over the following weeks was the migraine he got trying to follow the political intrigue of the Empire. The stuff his spies were reporting from their capital city of Golat read like a soap opera on crack.
If his kingdom ever went down a similar rabbit hole of rot and decay, he was going to burn it all down and start from scratch just to save himself the headache. He couldn’t believe all the nonsense and backstabbing that went on over in the Empire. It was a miracle they got anything done over there.
Thankfully he didn’t have to spend too long focusing on their problems. He shoved the useless politics from the Empire to the back of his mind before he turned to more important things. Like picking dirt from under his nails.
Or in this case, finishing off decoding the rest of the symbols in his menagerie of magic.
There were quite a few doozies in this last batch. Some were so out there he had to slap more esoteric names to them just so he could make sense of what they did.
Transmutation wasn’t one of the more esoteric ones, but holy shit it was like the holy grail of magical symbols. Well, Norman was exaggerating a bit. But not by much. Had this symbol been an enchantment, it could have done all the work Kalia and the other enchanters had been doing with the energy generation system.
It converted energy in one form to energy of another form. Simple, right? Um, no. This single set of symbols – yup a set of three – could convert, mana for example, into life energy. Think about that for a moment.
That one set of interlocking symbols completely removed the need for Norman to sacrifice other living things to revive people. And that was just one form of energy. He hadn’t had time to play with them to figure out all of the different types of energy he could convert. Something about finding an alternate source of life energy had short-circuited his concentration on that front. The symbols would be completely and utterly broken if it didn’t also require ten times the amount of energy in the input to convert to the output form of energy you wished. And that was with the spell being optimized.
That being said, mana was everywhere. Even in his blood. So there wasn’t exactly a shortage of it. He wasn’t sure exactly what generated mana. For all he knew, it could be inexhaustible. Although he doubted that.
It was something he should probably look into in the future. Another project for later.
To be perfectly honest, Norman wanted to stop right there and rewrite some of his spells to take advantage of this new discovery.
He didn’t but he really, really wanted to.
His perseverance paid off though as the next symbol he discovered was one he labeled Harmonic Synchronization, after remembering what Kalia had told him about resonance. Turns out spells did have resonant frequencies. He would never have known without this symbol.
Harmonic Synchronization contains a few different functions. One was an output function that allowed it to display the resonant frequency of a spell as a shimmering curtain of multicolored lights.
It's how he learned some of his spells weren’t exactly stable. If he hadn’t quite known that already. It took a lot of spell comparisons to find out what all the lights meant, and he was still just learning. But he had a basic grasp of the fundamentals. The larger the fluctuating lights, the worse the harmonization. Simple in theory. Lights that touched or crossed others were a big red flag. Turns out that consisted of most of his spells. He was surprised he hadn’t blown himself up more often after seeing the violently clashing harmonics.
Fixing the spells turned out to be possible using that same symbol. It didn’t completely negate the violent harmonics, but it did stabilize them. He would need to do extensive testing later to see what advantages this gave his spells.
Ethereal Binding was where shit started getting weird. This little squiggle allowed Norman to add targeting to his spells. He had been forced to target himself with one of his spells to figure this out. Have you ever walked into a spider web? It kind of felt like that when the spell targeted you. Like something you couldn’t quite see was touching you.
It was an oddly disturbing feeling that made him keep trying to scratch at the area. It also made it so his spell was able to hurt him. So not only did it anchor a spell to a destined target, but it also bypassed the caster's immunity to their own spells. He also found another neat little side effect of the symbol. If oriented a certain way, it forced all of the damage from a spell onto that target, even if the spell was an area of effect. Norman wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to use that feature since most of his spells were designed to kill anyway. But it was nice to know it existed.
The Soul Anchor came next. And this was another wacky one. Until now, the only spell Norman had been able to attach to a soul had been his blood oath. And that was cobbled together to do even that. He had never expected the blood oath to last on Vincent when he used it that one time. Heck, it had probably worn off by now if the man had bothered to check.
But with this symbol, he now had a reliable way to anchor spells to the soul instead of anchoring a soul to a spell as he did with his phylacteries. It might seem like a small differentiation, but in magic, it was two very different things.
Last but not least was Soul Resonance. If you thought the others were weird, sit down and buckle up. This little Gordian knot of mismatched lines and swirls was damn near alive.
Testing what it did proved to be rather difficult until Norman combined it with Soul Anchor and dragged out one of the trapped souls from the prison. The effect appeared like a hazy ribbon entangled within the person's soul. Not outside the soul like with the Soul Anchor. With no way to interact with the spell effect, he had to twist and shape the soul to see what it did. He didn’t feel bad for the Third Prince, who was his test subject today, the man deserved everything he was getting and more.
As the soul was changed, the gossamer lines within changed with it. Even when Norman tried to pinch or distort a section of the man’s soul – that harbored the lines – they would seem to sense what was coming and snap to an undamaged section.
Norman even tried his Mana Vacuum, a Spell Trap, as well as sticking the soul back inside the Soul Trap, everything he could think of to disrupt or nullify the magic of the spell. Nothing he did was able to harm or remove the resonance. Well, he knew of one way, but if your only option was to crack open the soul to get rid of this, you were pretty much screwed anyway.
It would take time to come up with new spells with all of these interesting new symbols but he already had ideas for a few. The next person to think Normenia was an easy target was going to have a very, very bad time. He gave the deformed prince a pat on the cheek and shoved him into A stasis anchor. Norman suspected there would be a lot more testing in the near future so it was best to keep him around.
Norman and Kalia stepped out of the teleporter along with his guards.
It was Norman’s first time in California. Honestly, it was much like he imagined, only with fewer cars. If it wasn’t for electric vehicles, he doubled there would be more than a handful of working cars on the road. However, the lack of cars could also be due to the secure location where the teleporter was housed.
A man walked over and offered his hand. “Lord Norman, the Admiral is attending to some last-minute work but he will meet you at the restaurant. I will be your guide and driver.”
He shook the offered hand and followed the man to a blacked-out SUV. He couldn’t help rolling his eyes as the man opened the armored door.
“Is this really necessary?”
“The Admiral insisted we treat you with the utmost respect.”
Norman sighed, not bothering to correct the man’s assumptions. He was referring to the necessity of having an armored SUV as a ride rather than any disrespect he might have felt. Any spell he was concerned about wouldn’t be stopped by simple armor plates. Heck, Norman knew of at least six spells that could either punch through the armor or bypass it entirely. Unless it was enchanted. And he knew by Kalia’s lack of interest in the vehicle that it was not.
It wasn’t concern over his or Kalia’s safety. They were both wearing his newest generation of armor amulets. Ones designed to automatically deploy if they sensed any danger to the wearer as well as enchanted by Kalia. He was pretty sure this new design could take a tank round without the person inside suffering more than a mild bruise.
Even if someone could get past the protection, there was always his backup phylactery. Which was safely hidden nearby thanks to Grobert.
He had tried to convince Kalia to be linked to one of the devices, but her stance on killing another to save herself was firm. He could respect that, even if it annoyed him. Unfortunately, he couldn’t perform the same trick he used to get rid of her censure with the phylacteries. Her refusal just meant he had to be extra vigilant that she wasn’t hurt, or taken. If Norman couldn’t at least do that much, he should probably go live as a hermit somewhere and stop calling himself a lord.
The trip to the destination didn’t take long with the lack of traffic, something he was immensely grateful for. The vehicle felt like a rolling coffin to him. Soon the pair exited their ride outside a swanky-looking restaurant. It was the type of place he couldn’t have afforded to even glance at back in his pre-collapse years. Not that they would have let him in spitting distance of such a high-class place back then anyway. These sorts of places were usually run by people who threw vast amounts of cash at politicians and police to keep people like him away.
As he exited the SUV, he glanced around. He was surprised by how normal everything seemed. It seemed this part of Southern California was firmly stuck in the pre-collapse era. At least from what he knew of California. The weather was nice, and there were people out and about going on with hardly a care. Norman found it a bit weird. Almost like he had stepped out of the future and into the past. It was almost as if everyone wanted to deny the world had irrevocably changed. Or maybe they had finally grown used to it?
A far too fake-looking woman with bleach blonde hair and a body only plastic surgery could produce walked them to their table. It was a testament to how much Norman had changed over the years as he barely even glanced at the woman. The superficial beauty on display here just didn’t register for him anymore.
“Well, this place is quite something,” Norman remarked, trying to distract Kalia from nervously glancing around.
“It’s a bit too much, don’t you think?”
He reached over and gave the woman’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “It's fine. Just the Admiral showing his thanks.” Truth is, the Admiral could have shown his thanks with a less notable venue. But Norman couldn’t pass up a date night opportunity like this.
Norman had asked her out because he wanted to have a nice date with her as well as get her out of her workshop for a bit. Both of them tended to overwork but taking a break now and then was important.
The two didn’t order any food right away, but they did get drinks. They both sipped their wine until the Admiral finally arrived.
“Apologies for being late,” the man spoke.
Norman rose and shook the man’s offered hand. “Admiral, I don’t know if the two of you have met, this is Kalia.”
“Yes, Miss Sorento. We have actually met, briefly at Lord Norman’s coronation and once prior.”
Her smile turned into a frown, “Prior? You knew my father, didn’t you.”
“I wouldn’t say I know him,” The Admiral replied, seeing her expression change. He released her hand and sat across from the pair. “But I am aware of his work due to my position in the military.”
“I assume that means he is still alive,” she asked through pursed lips.
The Admiral glanced toward Norman before turning back toward Kalia. “…As far as I’m aware. I’m sorry if I brought up a sore subject. I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s fine, Admiral,” Kalia let out a breath. “You couldn’t have known what my bastard of a father had done.”
Norman cleared his throat, not wanting their nice outing to devolve into something that would leave a bad memory in Kalia’s mind. “Admiral, what did you wish to speak about? There isn’t an issue with the refugees, is there?”
“No, those are fine. Even if we took them all, three thousand people is a drop in the bucket compared to the population here. And we can always use more seasoned soldiers. I asked you here because the jorik and Fariken have brought up some concerns about this latest collapse. Although the fariken might just have mentioned it to look like they are on top of things, you’ve met Cho Klu’klik. She’s pretty typical for their race. But don’t let their tempermentality fool you, they are quite advanced as far as races go. They just don’t like to share with others.”
“Ok? What does that have to do with me?”
“Eh… they wanted to get the gron’s opinion on the matter, seeing as they have been around far longer than the other races.”
“Ah. And they need me to set up a meeting?”
The Admiral nodded.
“I’ll see what I can do. But it may take time.”
“That’s all I ask. Now, I’ll let you two enjoy your meal. The bill is on me, so don’t worry about it.” The two thanked the Admiral as he got up and left.
“We can do this some other time,” Norman suggested after the Admiral left. He knew her father was a sensitive subject.
Kalia took a deep breath before responding. “No, it's fine. I won’t let my father ruin another day for me. He has taken enough of those already.”
The pair ate and chatted, but Norman could tell Kalia was still upset over the mention of her father. He could relate to having shitty parents but at least his parents had only left him. What hers did was a thousand times worse. He racked his brain for a way to get her mind off of her father when an idea struck him.
“I heard you were making progress on your new project?”
She beamed up at him before launching into detail on what she was working on. “Well, we had a breakthrough in the resonant frequency needed to convert stored mana into electricity. It turned out we needed multiple overlapping resonances to break down the stored mana into usable energy. Our early tests are rather crude but with each test we are improving the conversion ratio.”
Changing the topic had been the correct choice, Kalia really came alive when discussing her work. And he loved to see her excitement. “That’s great! When did this happen?”
He was truly impressed by her and the other enchanters' work.
While there was a lot of overlap between spells and enchantments, they weren’t the same. Spells were more like the programming and enchantments were like the hardware. Although that analogy was crude at best. If spells were programming, it was programming that only worked once and had to constantly be rewritten every time you used it. He supposed the permanent spell circles were a closer approximation to programming. But they were still limited. If you wanted to add magic to a building, wall, or city, you needed enchantments.
“A few days ago,” she shrugged. “I didn’t want to make a big deal about it until we had a working prototype. Speaking of which, how did you hear about it anyway?"
Norman chuckled. “You might not want to make a big deal about it, but Saliu couldn’t help talking Nolia’s ear off about the accomplishment. And she in turn complained to me that all these breakthroughs were driving her bonkers.”
Kalia giggled at that. “I find that hard to believe.”
He smiled. Norman knew full well that Kalia would never believe the prim Finance Administrator would ever have complained about her mate or used the word bonkers. But just imagining it was enough to get her to smile, so it had been worth it.
Although he did hear about the project from Nolia, it only came up in a conversation asking to increase the funding for the enchanters. Something he had gladly accepted once he learned of their breakthrough. Getting working electricity for the entire town would be a game changer.
The rest of the night flew by as they chatted and shared stories.
“You didn’t!” Kalia exclaimed.
“Yup, had to walk all the way home in my birthday suit. As you can imagine, I didn’t stay friends with those kids after that.”
Kalia giggled at Norman’s story from when he was still in grade school. It was when he went swimming at a local pond and the so-called friends at the time were jealous that the popular girl liked him and not them. So to take revenge they stole all his clothes. In hindsight, the dare to go swimming buck ass naked was dumb. But he was a stupid kid, as most kids are. The funny thing is he hadn’t even liked the girl they got so upset about. If he remembered correctly, he thought she was rather mean because of how she treated those same friends.
Despite the sour mood toward the beginning of their date, the evening turned out quite nice. He hadn’t shared half of what he did tonight with anyone else. Most of what he told Kalia was so embarrassing he would rather forget it. But telling her felt right. He knew she wouldn’t judge him for it like some of the other women he dated in the past.
Norman was tempted to ask the Admiral where Kalia’s father was, just so he could retrieve the man and beat some sense into him for treating Kalia this way. But he quickly dismissed that idea. While it might bring him some joy, he doubted Kalia would see it that way. No, it was better off if the man was simply forgotten. The only thing that would change his mind is if Kalia asked him personally. And he doubted that would ever happen.
Before he knew it they were back in Ashvale and he was standing outside her shop slash house with his guards standing a respectable distance away. He wished the night could have lasted longer.
“Thank you for tonight, Norman. I had fun. And thank you for taking my mind off my father. That was sweet of you.”
“Was I that transparent?” he asked with chagrin.
“No,” she smiled before leaning in to give him a kiss on the lips. “I didn’t realize what you had done until the ride back.”
While Norman wanted to go in for a second kiss and see where the night led, he held himself back. “Until the next time then,” he gave her a bow and kissed her hand.
She giggled again and fanned herself with exaggeration. “You best go.”
He smiled and waved at her one last time before walking away, happier than he had been in a long time.
***
The next few weeks flew by. Norman mostly kept busy with his projects and running the city. Although he still made time for Kalia.
By this point, the city could pretty much run itself. He only chimed in when it was something important. Which was happening far less often now that tensions had settled along the border and with the Council.
Even the worry over the Empire turned out to be overblown. Everything his spies reported said they had no clue the Third Prince was dead. The worst thing that happened to him over the following weeks was the migraine he got trying to follow the political intrigue of the Empire. The stuff his spies were reporting from their capital city of Golat read like a soap opera on crack.
If his kingdom ever went down a similar rabbit hole of rot and decay, he was going to burn it all down and start from scratch just to save himself the headache. He couldn’t believe all the nonsense and backstabbing that went on over in the Empire. It was a miracle they got anything done over there.
Thankfully he didn’t have to spend too long focusing on their problems. He shoved the useless politics from the Empire to the back of his mind before he turned to more important things. Like picking dirt from under his nails.
Or in this case, finishing off decoding the rest of the symbols in his menagerie of magic.
There were quite a few doozies in this last batch. Some were so out there he had to slap more esoteric names to them just so he could make sense of what they did.
Transmutation wasn’t one of the more esoteric ones, but holy shit it was like the holy grail of magical symbols. Well, Norman was exaggerating a bit. But not by much. Had this symbol been an enchantment, it could have done all the work Kalia and the other enchanters had been doing with the energy generation system.
It converted energy in one form to energy of another form. Simple, right? Um, no. This single set of symbols – yup a set of three – could convert, mana for example, into life energy. Think about that for a moment.
That one set of interlocking symbols completely removed the need for Norman to sacrifice other living things to revive people. And that was just one form of energy. He hadn’t had time to play with them to figure out all of the different types of energy he could convert. Something about finding an alternate source of life energy had short-circuited his concentration on that front. The symbols would be completely and utterly broken if it didn’t also require ten times the amount of energy in the input to convert to the output form of energy you wished. And that was with the spell being optimized.
That being said, mana was everywhere. Even in his blood. So there wasn’t exactly a shortage of it. He wasn’t sure exactly what generated mana. For all he knew, it could be inexhaustible. Although he doubted that.
It was something he should probably look into in the future. Another project for later.
To be perfectly honest, Norman wanted to stop right there and rewrite some of his spells to take advantage of this new discovery.
He didn’t but he really, really wanted to.
His perseverance paid off though as the next symbol he discovered was one he labeled Harmonic Synchronization, after remembering what Kalia had told him about resonance. Turns out spells did have resonant frequencies. He would never have known without this symbol.
Harmonic Synchronization contains a few different functions. One was an output function that allowed it to display the resonant frequency of a spell as a shimmering curtain of multicolored lights.
It's how he learned some of his spells weren’t exactly stable. If he hadn’t quite known that already. It took a lot of spell comparisons to find out what all the lights meant, and he was still just learning. But he had a basic grasp of the fundamentals. The larger the fluctuating lights, the worse the harmonization. Simple in theory. Lights that touched or crossed others were a big red flag. Turns out that consisted of most of his spells. He was surprised he hadn’t blown himself up more often after seeing the violently clashing harmonics.
Fixing the spells turned out to be possible using that same symbol. It didn’t completely negate the violent harmonics, but it did stabilize them. He would need to do extensive testing later to see what advantages this gave his spells.
Ethereal Binding was where shit started getting weird. This little squiggle allowed Norman to add targeting to his spells. He had been forced to target himself with one of his spells to figure this out. Have you ever walked into a spider web? It kind of felt like that when the spell targeted you. Like something you couldn’t quite see was touching you.
It was an oddly disturbing feeling that made him keep trying to scratch at the area. It also made it so his spell was able to hurt him. So not only did it anchor a spell to a destined target, but it also bypassed the caster's immunity to their own spells. He also found another neat little side effect of the symbol. If oriented a certain way, it forced all of the damage from a spell onto that target, even if the spell was an area of effect. Norman wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to use that feature since most of his spells were designed to kill anyway. But it was nice to know it existed.
The Soul Anchor came next. And this was another wacky one. Until now, the only spell Norman had been able to attach to a soul had been his blood oath. And that was cobbled together to do even that. He had never expected the blood oath to last on Vincent when he used it that one time. Heck, it had probably worn off by now if the man had bothered to check.
But with this symbol, he now had a reliable way to anchor spells to the soul instead of anchoring a soul to a spell as he did with his phylacteries. It might seem like a small differentiation, but in magic, it was two very different things.
Last but not least was Soul Resonance. If you thought the others were weird, sit down and buckle up. This little Gordian knot of mismatched lines and swirls was damn near alive.
Testing what it did proved to be rather difficult until Norman combined it with Soul Anchor and dragged out one of the trapped souls from the prison. The effect appeared like a hazy ribbon entangled within the person's soul. Not outside the soul like with the Soul Anchor. With no way to interact with the spell effect, he had to twist and shape the soul to see what it did. He didn’t feel bad for the Third Prince, who was his test subject today, the man deserved everything he was getting and more.
As the soul was changed, the gossamer lines within changed with it. Even when Norman tried to pinch or distort a section of the man’s soul – that harbored the lines – they would seem to sense what was coming and snap to an undamaged section.
Norman even tried his Mana Vacuum, a Spell Trap, as well as sticking the soul back inside the Soul Trap, everything he could think of to disrupt or nullify the magic of the spell. Nothing he did was able to harm or remove the resonance. Well, he knew of one way, but if your only option was to crack open the soul to get rid of this, you were pretty much screwed anyway.
It would take time to come up with new spells with all of these interesting new symbols but he already had ideas for a few. The next person to think Normenia was an easy target was going to have a very, very bad time. He gave the deformed prince a pat on the cheek and shoved him into A stasis anchor. Norman suspected there would be a lot more testing in the near future so it was best to keep him around.
