Ends of Magic

Nathan grimaced and opened his mouth, but Khachi interrupted him.

“Let us speak in our rooms.” Khachi said, shaking his head slightly at Nathan.

Yeah, probably better if this conversation isn’t overheard. I’m not even sure what to say. Tell Stella she was under the effect of a powerful social skill? Ask her to be more careful? I’m not sure that’s possible. She’s supposed to Develop a way to resist this eventually, but clearly isn’t there yet.

The Heirs walked through the building in somewhat awkward silence. The two Halsmet elites that had been tailing them once more broke off to stand outside the door once they reached their rooms.

I gotta say, maybe I should protest being guarded around the clock. It just feels awkward, and I’m worried that they might overhear this. At least they won’t be coming with us on Patrol. Having Brox around is going to be even worse though.

They all sat. Stella looked around suspiciously, seeing how everybody was focused on her. “What? Did you all decide to take up Hydra farming?”

All of the Heirs looked around at each other, nobody wanting to be the first to speak. It felt like an intervention, where everybody knew what needed to be said except the person who needed to hear it.

“Stella, you trust us, right? You trust me?” Nathan said, meeting her eyes.

She blinked at him. “...yes. We’ve stared the Ghoul in the eye, together.” She snorted. "A lot."

Confused by the non-sequitur, she answered. “He’s dragon’s breath. It’ll be great to go on patrol with him. I want to follow the path he blazes, we could learn so much from him.” She broke off, grinning widely.

“What did you think of Brox before we met him?” Nathan asked gently.

Stella shrugged. “I didn’t know him then. He’s a Questor, so I was apprehensive. But he’s on our side, beyond the hold of prophecy. Did you hear what he said?” The mage lowered her voice, mimicking Brox. “I would wish you the blessings of Oltia. Or I would, if I hadn’t killed her.”

She turned towards Khachi. “Seems he’s got things to teach you of the divine.”

“Smoke and blood.” Sarah’s words were bitter, and she rubbed at her forehead in frustration.

“What?” Stella said, turning back to her friends, her forehead creasing with confusion. “What’s your target?”

Khachi was about to speak, but Nathan held up a hand. “Stella, Brox has a social skill. A powerful one. It makes him seem cool and friendly. You’ll want to agree with him on everything. It's that kind of skill.”

“No. That’s not true. I would know if that were true.” Stella sounded offended, but not entirely sure of herself. Then her tone firmed. “Brox is on our side. He’s here to save us.”

“Trust me, just for a moment.” Nathan said. “He’s got a skill that’s making you like him. Why would you like him? He implied he wants to fight the dungeon for no reason.”

Stella still looked unsure.

Nathan looked around at the other Heirs. “We all have mental defense skills. None of us like Brox, right?”

Aarl nodded firmly.

“Muckgrabber’s asshole, that’s what he is.” said Sarah.

Khachi raised up a placating hand. “He is a foe to our enemies. But that makes him our ally, not our friend.”

Nathan turned back to Stella. “What did your parents say about Brox? Remember it. Why did they say that?”

The mage was rubbing at her temples, looking down at the ground.

Nathan had a vague sense of pushing at an ephemeral barrier with a limb he didn’t have. It was like his control of his antimagic, but orthogonal. It was yet another new sense. He tried to exert control over the feeling and nothing happened. Acting on a hunch, Nathan continued speaking.

“Trust me, and trust yourself. Ask yourself, why do you like Brox? Do you have a reason for it?”

His words pushed at the intangible barrier, and Nathan could feel it tearing. “It’s a skill, Stella. Recognize it for what it is.”

Her face grew strained, teeth gritting. Then she looked up at him, visibly furious. “At least Taeol’s magic didn’t lie.”

Leadership 6 achieved!

Khachi breathed out a deep breath of relief, before holding up a restraining hand. “Hear me, hold yourself still. We need him against Giantsrest, and his skill would not be able to force you to attack your teammates as Taeol's spell did."

Stella’s eyes sparked, and her hands lit on fire. “Do we need all of him?”

Hoo boy. I’m not sure she’s wrong here. What he’s doing is not only a dick move, but also dangerous. His skill clearly compromises people’s judgment, which is not a great thing to do while Adventuring. But I’m not sure what to do about it. Should we confront him about it? Ask him to turn it off? Can Stella develop her skill in time?

“We don’t have to accept the shit he’s pouring on us.” Sarah said.

Khachi’s lips peeled back from his teeth, but it looked apprehensive instead of aggressive. “He’s a Questor. We cannot drip blood in his eyes.”

Aarl had been silent in this conversation, but his face twisted with sudden animus. “Maybe we should trap him, demonstrate we could kill him.”

Stella and Sarah both nodded.

Nathan sucked in a breath. “That seems like a terrible idea. It’s a great way to die or at the very least make a powerful enemy where we don’t need to.”

“What then? Let him hold this edge without answering it?” Stella snarled.

Something Faline had said stuck out to Nathan, and he furrowed his brow as he repeated it. “He seeks true companions.”

The rest of the Heirs looked at Nathan like he was crazy, but Khachi spoke first. “Explain.”

“I think he buys his own story.” Nathan said. “He’s got this whole ‘invincible demigod’ thing going on, and whenever he walks into a room people either love him or hate him. But that means he doesn't have friends, just followers."

Nobody responded, not sure where he was going. Stella shook her head. “This is a dungeon for fools.”

But Nathan wasn’t done positing his theory. “What if what he wants are teammates? Peers. People who will work with him, but also stand up to him?”

Sarah’s frown did not abate. “He’s a Questor. He doesn’t seek peers. Only glory. We’ll repeat the past of our parents with that Path.”

“Being a peer is not something offered.” Khachi spoke slowly, as if feeling the way forward. “We cannot force him to do anything, and threatening him will end in smoke and blood.”

“Then what?” Stella said. She was still pissed, but her hands were no longer literally on fire.

Nathan sighed. “I don’t know. I think he’s mostly interested in me. Maybe I can go ask Sudraiel to change the patrol so it’s just me and him.”

“Not even as a game.” Aarl said, tone hard. “We won’t allow you to bait the castlebear for us again.”

Sarah snorted. “You’d leave us behind in levels. Further behind.” She turned to look at Stella for a moment, frowning. “Stella, you trusted us now, to tell you that Brox was influencing you. Trust us again.”

The mage frowned, but didn’t say anything.

Sarah continued. “The skill won’t work as well now that you know about it, and know how it feels. If it does influence you, we’ll protect you. It seems like Nathan and Khachi are entirely protected.” She shot them questioning looks, and got nods in return.

“They will deal with Brox. Aarl and I must spend our class resources to resist, but we can. We’ll try to stay farther away from the Questor. You should do your best to stay away from him, and work on Developing your own skills. We protect you on the battlefield, and we can protect you here.”

Khachi spoke seriously. “Until such time as we are his peers. To that aim, we must be as impressive as possible.”

“And not be impressed.” Nathan said wryly. “He’s used to everybody fawning over him and his deeds. Let’s not be too taken in by his legend. Sure, he’s a Questor. He says he’s conquered empires and killed gods and whatever. But we took down a city, and more than one dungeon. We won’t let him walk all over us.”

Stella still looked upset, but it was less furious and more resigned. “Yeah. Don’t let me mess up my build.” She paused, then shook her head. “He’s going to wake that dungeon. That’s clear to us all, right?”

Aarl sighed. “Yeah.”

—

The Heirs spent the rest of the day on various preparations. They ate together, then dispersed to spend some more time with their parents. The Guardians were on watch, but Nathan saw Stanel walking Aarl and Sarah through some advanced weapon practice atop the wall around Exea’s mansion.

We really should stop calling it that. This building won't survive if Giantsrest takes the city back. But not sure what else to call it. Not my problem.

Nathan sought out Liluce, remembering that the administrator had a list of magic that needed to be broken around the city. He spent a good portion of the afternoon with her, breaking into magically sealed vaults with her pair of freed elites by his side.

Each of the grand homes was crowded with recently freed citizens of Halsmet, and they treated Nathan with an awe that he found uncomfortable. There was some tension about what was going to happen to the contents of the vaults - but Liluce had been prepared. She used the elites and Nathan to be sure that nobody got pushy, handed out itemized lists of the contents as each vault was opened and the contents carted back to the central mansion.

She repeated the same spiel each time. “We’re all weaving the same color. Some of the value will return to you, but these valuables are to be used against Giantsrest, to ensure our freedom.”

This didn’t placate everybody, but whenever there was disagreement, Liluce simply raised an eyebrow. “Do you want to hoard this wealth for yourselves? Or share in the wealth we found in Exea’s vaults, instead?”

That and the presence of Nathan and the elites was enough to head off any issues before they started, and they cleared out a mind-numbing amount of wealth from the vaults. Only a small fraction of it was in coinage and precious metals. Most of it was enchanted items and crafting materials for enchantments.

“What are you going to use all of it for?” Nathan asked, watching an elite carrying a dimensional pouch loaded with enchanting tools and valuable ingredients.

Liluce smiled at him. “Outfitting our own Adventurers, and hiring more from Gemore. Myrla’s got her finger set on starting our own Guild, though it’ll have the handprint of the Gemore Adventurers Guild.”

She gauged him, and when he seemed interested she continued. “It’ll be a time before Halsmet has the crafters and money to do that by itself. It’s my blasphemous hope that this treasure will let us create a guild fit to hold a hand against Giantsrest, and safeguard farms in the way that Gemore does.”

Her tone became grim. “It’ll need to, if this city is to survive.”

“Is Egall starting a school for mages part of that vision?” Nathan asked, genuinely curious.

Liluce looked over, surprised. “Oh, you had a hand in that? It shines light in my eyes that she’s agreed. We need mages of our own, like your own Tower of Trickery.”

“Do you know what she’s going to call it?”

The thin scribe shook her head. “She was suggesting the Ghosts of Halsmet. Name doesn’t matter much, does it?”

Nathan shrugged. “Seems fine to me. Where to next?”

—

He reconvened with the Heirs for dinner, after which they had another more subdued gathering with their parents. The Guardians seemed like they wanted to eke out every moment of time with their kids.

After dinner, Stella turned to Nathan. “To raise the past, can you teach me about plasma?” She shook her head. “It feels like it’s been an age, but that was only weeks ago.”

Nathan looked over at her and smiled. “Sure, thanks for being patient. I hope the other stuff we’ve been talking about has been interesting.”

Dalo looked over, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “Would you like a more private place to share this Insight?”

“Nope.” Nathan replied, his faint smile still present. “You're welcome to listen in. But keep in mind the benefits of freely sharing information, if I ask for Insights in the future."

Dalo shot a significant glance with his wife, considering the offer.

She just scooched over on the couch to wrapped an arm around her husband. “Hear me, but I’m happy to learn whatever you have to teach.”

Excellent. I've got the edges of a plan for when things are a little calmer, and some Insights from these two will make it a lot easier. It's also an ego boost to have these two excited to learn magic from me. I remember them dismantling a monster the size of a hill right in front of me.

Nathan pursed his lips, thinking for a minute. “Dalo, Kullal. Before we do get started, I want to warn you. Some of what I’m going to talk about depends on things I’ve taught Stella that you haven’t heard before. It also might conflict with your current Insights. I don’t want to get into a debate about who’s right. Your Insights work, mine should too. Once I’ve finished laying them out you can describe yours if you think Stella needs to hear them. But it’s important she not be split between two conflicting methods.”

Dalo frowned a bit and opened his mouth, but closed it again after Kullal gave him a squeeze. Instead he just nodded. “Please, proceed. I am curious to learn more about the fuel of this blaze.”

Nathan turned back to Stella. “Right. So, you made plasma earlier by making a cage of force, magnetism and light and then heating up the inside, right? You wanted to trap all of the energy you put in in a small space, then release it in a targeted way.”

She shrugged. “About on target. I wanted to get all of the output of the fire mana. Light, heat, hot gas, everything, concentrated on one spot. But the gas inside got weird. My air mana didn’t work to hold it in anymore. Then I started experimenting with it.”

Nathan pointed a finger at her. “Yes we call that plasma. The fourth state of matter. It’s fundamentally different from a solid, a liquid or a gas, but you make it by superheating a gas.”

“How is it different?” Kulllal said, frowning. “I have noticed this thing. It acts strangely with lightning mana.”

“Yup.” Nathan nodded. “In normal substances you have both positive and negative charges bound closely together. So closely that the overall material is neutral. But when you heat a gas hot enough, the charges separate from each other and you’re left with a soup of both positive and negative charges floating around. They’re both still present, but they can move independently from each other.”

“To set aside these ‘charges' - why only a gas?” Dalo asked. “Can this ‘plasma’ come from something solid as well?”

“Not usually. Everything transitions from solid to liquid to gas to plasma as it gets hotter. There's a few exceptions. Depending on pressure you can go straight from solid to gas… or from solid to plasma. But you’d have to have an incredibly high pressure for that…”

I don’t want to get distracted with phase diagrams and triple points.

Nathan shook his head to avoid getting distracted. “Regardless. Plasma will happen to everything if you get it hot enough. You can also make it with lightning. The creation of plasma is a lot of why lightning is loud. It usually reverts to normal gas pretty quickly.”

Dalo blinked at him. “What? Every time I use a lightning spell I’m creating this… plasma? But it does not seem so dangerous then. Well, no more than a normal lightning bolt.”

Nathan chuckled. “Yes. More dangerous things can happen when you make very dense and very hot plasma, like the spell you cast on the Grave Tangle. There’s a point you can hit where a different kind of reaction starts happening.” He locked eyes with Stella. “That’s a very different level of Insight, and far more dangerous. Do not keep compressing and heating plasma to see how far you can go. It will explode violently and uncontrollably, and convey silent death all around.”

She pouted slightly, clearly curious what he meant by 'silent death.'

High-tier Lecturing 3 achieved!

He glanced at Dalo. “I’m honestly impressed that you survived making a spell that involved that as a component. On Earth our first tests with that kind of power made a column of fire ten thousand feet tall and a crater a mile and a half across. The land was poisoned for generations."

Stella’s eyes lit up at Nathan’s words, and Kullal shot him a worried look.

Nathan held up a finger in front of Stella. “That crater was centered on the place where the compression happened. Don’t try it unless you can survive being at the heart of an explosion that would leave a smoking crater where Old Gemore stands. Not Gemore. The entire ruin of Old Gemore, gone.” He lowered the finger and turned back to Dalo.

“Still. It takes an utterly ludicrous amount of power to get there. I have to imagine you had help from Davrar. A skill that makes things easier to burn?” Nathan cocked an eyebrow at the old mage.

Magical Intuition 4 achieved!

Dalo frowned unhappily, but gave a slow nod. “Something like that. This… silent death you speak of, I would learn more. I think of it as a malign and invisible energy.”

Nathan looked between Dalo and Kullal, eyebrows raised. "Speaking about it will only make it easier to achieve. Shield yourself whenever you use this magic, and heal yourself frequently. That should be enough."

I'm pretty sure [Curing] fixes cancers, after all.

Stella interrupted. “You all prophesy the dangers, when it’s been decided I won’t even learn about it! Let’s skip over it, and talk about plasma.”

Kullal closed her eyes and bowed her head, giving Nathan a sign to proceed.

He shrugged. “Right, plasma. It’s a mixture of positive and negative charges that are more separate from each other than in any other matter. In fact it’s common for the negative charges to fly off since they’re so much smaller, leaving you with a plasma that’s overall positively charged.”

“Smaller charges? Just more of them?” Stella asked, looking confused.

Nathan shook his head. “No, sorry. They’ve got the same charge, but they’re physically smaller, and move much faster. We call them electrons.”

“What are the positive charges called?”

I don’t want to go down nuclear theory right now. Maybe later. But it’s not really necessary for now, and I don’t know how easily that Insight leads to fission magic or something like that.

“Protons. But this all touches on a much deeper Insight that I don’t want to get into and isn't important now. In a plasma, you have a ton of individual charges floating around. That means three important things.” Nathan raised three fingers.

“First, the particles affect each other because of the charge.” He held up his two fists a foot apart. “In a normal gas, if this particle moves, nothing happens to this one until they touch.” He moved his fists together until they bounced off each other. “But in a plasma, the particles will affect each other from a distance, usually repelling one another because they're both positive.” He moved one fist towards the other, but this time the second hand moved away from it.

Kullal was frowning at Nathan. “Are all things made of particles?”

“Mom! Stop interrupting. Both of you, I’d trade a grand Insight for silence. But yes. Everything is particles. Particles of what, I'd like to know.” She gave Nathan a glare.

Aarl chuckled from the side. “Ahh, Caxol family arguments.”

Everybody involved in the conversation turned their ire on the source of the interruption for a moment, and the swordsman quailed before them and raised his hands in surrender.

Nathan continued, raising his two fingers again. “That has really important implications. It means that even though a plasma acts like air in some ways, it acts like water in others. It can have waves and other group behaviors in a way air doesn’t. It’s harder to pressurize.”

“Scholars and their interests. Where’d they find a fourth Caxol?” Stanel said quietly to Kia from the side.

I’m pretty sure he just called me a nerd. But who wouldn’t nerd out about using science to do magic?

Stella’s expression cleared. “So it’s not just hot air!”

Nathan chuckled at her phrasing. “No. The second point is that you can separate out the charges with an electric field, but it’s harder the denser the plasma. If you put a plasma in a strong electric field and then slice it in half, one half will be more ‘positive’ and the other will be more ‘negative’. They’ll be really unstable, but pack a lot of energy. And the high charge means they’ll be easier to move around with electric fields. Do you understand?”

“I think so?” Stella said, her brows scrunched up. “Earlier I did the containment with magnetic fields, is that aiming at the right target?”

“Yeah.” Nathan nodded. “That’s a good way to do it, but you also need to prevent any air from touching it. You remember pulling out all of the air from a bubble to make a vacuum when you were working on the light Insight? Like that.”

Dalo shot an utterly bewildered look at Kullal, mouthing the word ‘field’. She shrugged in response.

“Right. Third and last. Plasma is an incredibly good conductor of lightning - electricity. You’ve already used this. Remember when you destroyed the Old Gemore siege constructs, when your lightning followed their beams of light back to the source?”

“That was plasma?” Stella looked satisfied. “So those light beams were strong enough to make plasma, which was a path for the electricity mana to flow down? You mentioned aiming lightning with light, but I haven’t gotten the chance to try it.”

“Yes. We call them electrolasers, but they don’t need to make a lot of plasma, just a little bit. Then the electricity will flow and make more. The same thing happens whenever you connect a lightning bolt to something. That’s why you can keep channeling it and it mostly follows the same path. But if you control the plasma, it’ll help you control the flow of lightning.”

High-tier Lecturing 4 achieved!

Stella collapsed back in her chair. “I need to try some magic.”

Nathan smirked. “Go ahead. I don’t have any other plans.”

Aarl stood. “If this is our last night in Halsmet, then I do. See you in the morning.”

Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Aura of Antimagic 6

Permanent Talent 2: Perfected Body 7

Talent 3: High-tier Slow Fall 10

Class: Implacable Antimage level 210

Deepened Stamina: 6600/6600

Antimage’s Impassivity

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Implacable Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Improved Antimagic

Strenuous Agility

Hand-to-hand Expertise

Class: Assassin of Gemore level76

Regenerative Focus: 860/860

Catastrophic Blows

Stealthy Movement

Infiltration

Forgettable

Unsuspecting Strike

Utility skills:

Battle Meditation 8

Leadership 6

High-tier Sprinting 7

Magical Perception 6

High-tier Notice 10

Magical Intuition 4

High-tier Dodging Footwork 9

Mental Fortress 3

High-tier Lecturing 4

High-tier Tumbling 7

Mid-tier Noticeability 7

Low-tier Quiet Movement 4

Low-tier Disguise 4

Mid-tier Battle Cry 1