Before we reached our hunting targets- the disembowelers- we had some travel time during which we could do further tests. Making sure the teens could control their abilities was important for once we got back to Earth. It wasn’t Extra’s job to make sure nobody had powers, just to stop unwanted extraterrestrial or extradimensional interactions. It just so happened that was sometimes people trying to unlock further powers. Which was why I was here, because they were annoyed that I’d helped Thiziri out.
Frankly, though, I thought I was saving New Bay from some trouble. She might have gone to more extreme lengths to experience power again, possibly causing more trouble for the mayor. While I didn’t care about the man in particular, even short disruptions to the city’s leadership would provide opportunities for villains to sneak in danger that would have otherwise been stopped. Plus I personally understood the feeling of needing power. I’d been able to do so little before I came here.
Anyway, at this point Extra owed me. I got yanked into this world on the last shift I was supposed to be helping them out for free. They’d probably try to pay me for my time, but I might try to negotiate for future leniency. I wasn’t going to do anything that would really upset them- they wouldn’t have let me get away with something this time if that was the case. Not like I’d open portals with monsters. I frequently closed the ones other people made.
-----
Midnight helped me perform the experiment, and the results were fascinating. It involved teaching people a trivial lightning ‘spell’. I was hesitant to even call it a cantrip, as it would have been equivalent to the significantly downpowered Shocking Grasp I used to employ to annoy people and at the same time try to snag experience. It hadn’t at all been efficient, but I was trying anything I could.
The spell would be equivalent to a bit of static electricity. It involved only three somatic gestures and five words of power, and even some of those were unnecessary. They just stopped it from being a random discharge, instead focusing the electricity on the tip of a finger.
Midnight and I did it trivially. He hadn’t actually had much practice with the local methods, but he did share in my proficiency with energy spells. The hard part was the somatic components, since he didn’t have hands. Fortunately, it turned out that his adaptive suit’s ability to form hands worked just fine. In fact, he could even program it to replicate a specific set of gestures which might be concerningly good in the future.
On my end, I also tried to teach Inasyah and some of the Extra agents. Well, only one was willing to actually try. A couple others simply refused, others explained that they should focus on alertness. Maybe they just thought they couldn’t and didn’t want to embarrass themselves. At least Evija was willing to try.
Inasyah had no talent for energy magic, or lightning in particular. Not as far as we knew, anyway. She still learned just fine. She was familiar with the local magic due to her dark magic training.
Evija was a normal human. She was about as old as Extra allowed their field agents to get, but still in good shape and capable. Mid to late forties, I estimated.
She got the pronunciations down perfectly. Hand gestures? Flawless. Magic? Nonexistent.
How disappointing. And not her. Just the situation.
“Your body isn’t holding any mana,” I said. Everyone from my world held mana, but not from Earth. “I still kind of expected it to work, though.”
Evija sighed. “It would have been cool. Everyone wants to do magic.”
“Right?” I said. “Who wouldn’t?”
Sticks in the mud, that was who.
Inasyah was willing to overlook my actions up to that point, but when I asked her about manually infusing mana into Evija- just a tiny amount, there was no way it could hurt her even if it went wild- she shook her head. “I’m going to have to ask that you don’t infuse any Extra agents with magic. If we actually allowed that, we would be quite hypocritical.”
Inasyah could survive being hypocritical. Malaliel might actually explode if she went too far. I wasn’t completely certain, but it certainly wouldn’t be good for her.
Midnight did tests on the other end. Meter managed just fine. It was unsurprising, as he’d done more complicated spells that were outside of his affinity.
Malaliel was innately magical, and Midnight managed to convince her that it was worth experimenting to learn about this dimension in case there was further trouble. We weren’t expecting to resolve this whole thing in the next day or two, unless there was a breakthrough with our understanding of the curse. Malaliel was also successful at the training spell.
So was Graciana, though it took her a bit longer. Was alchemist magic related? She had no noted affinity for this sort of thing, but she learned the sounds and gestures faster than the dedicated Evija. Well, I hadn’t expected the totality of talent to be measured by such a vague scale. Zuresh hadn’t even realized people could have secondary affinities, and I thought maybe it went further- though the status windows people had awakened didn’t indicate more at the moment.
Ayat kept working at things until after I confirmed Evija’s perfection. Midnight finally reported her success after lunch. We hadn’t been precisely on the same schedule in our different groups, but it was early afternoon- about three or four hours of training.
Her success spurred on Ramen who wanted to ‘be magic too’. He did manage it. Midnight’s professional opinion was that he hadn’t really been trying that hard until he saw Ayat succeed. He finished just before bed.
Before that, I managed to convince another member of Extra to try. Once I got to the point where I expected some reaction from mana, I was satisfied. Learning the words and gestures wouldn’t do anything if people didn’t already have mana. I felt like I should be able to make that happen, but I had to admit it might not be for the best. If they didn’t have points and had to manually cast everything they would have a weak power. I would be cutting people off from other options, while not really improving their lives.
“Darn,” Evija said, managing to keep a somewhat convincing grin on her face. “I was hoping I could learn magic so I could get something like your Clean spell. It would be so nice for the dishes… or for many other things.”
“Get a dishwasher,” I said. Alternative uses could be good. “You can’t sense mana at all, right?”
“Don’t think so,” she shook her head. Her hair was cropped short- as was practical for someone serving as a soldier. “What’s it supposed to feel like?”
“You’d know,” I said. “But I can try to show you.”
I cupped my hands together and gathered mana. I didn’t want her to see something- though mana was usually invisible. I wanted her to feel it. If I didn’t do anything to her, Inasyah probably wouldn’t complain. I stopped at ten points, because it was a bit excessive to go all the way to my maximum for this usage. It was more than Shelter usually accepted, so I thought about putting the extra into durability. I doubted we would need it, but it wouldn’t hurt.
“Feel anything?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
How disappointing. Again, not her. Just the situation. To me, it felt like everyone was missing an arm. I personally had felt like I had a shrivelled one when I was low level in Graotan, only able to perform a few trivial spells.
I cast Shelter. We went to sleep.
-----
We found the disembowelers exactly where we expected. Given the info we had, the teens were not going to be fighting them, and I confirmed the wisdom of that upon seeing them in person. Head to tail they were over three meters long, standing nearly two meters at the shoulder.
“Raptors!” one of the extra agents yelled.
She must not have been paying attention at the strategy meetings. We’d discussed them. On the other hand, Extra had guns and knew how to point them at things. Precisely what the target was probably didn’t make a difference to them.
I didn’t have access to the internet here, but I was betting these creatures were divergent from the dinosaurs that Extra agents thought they looked like. Either way, what they were happened to be birdlike creatures with what amounted to claws at the end of their ‘wings’. Wicked claws that could either grasp or disembowel on their own- though the legs that were running along the ground should also be able to rip out people’s guts instead.
There were only three in the first pack we found. I brought Inasyah forward with me while the others handled the nervous horses and prepared ranged weaponry.
The area was forested to some extent, but fortunately our particular wagons were more capable of moving away from the roads, and the trees weren’t too dense. Otherwise, we would have just had to leave them behind as we searched. I’d spotted this particular group with a little bit of Divination magic. I had learned some time ago that a smartphone was a great material focus for most Divination, as it worked as more than just a reflective surface.
Finding big monsters wasn’t that hard though.
“I’ll try to take down two, if I can,” I explained to Inasyah. “After I complete my spell you can go for one of those remains, though if I do bring down two I wouldn’t mind taking down the third.”
Lightning marks would be expected. Unlike the land ravagers, disembowelers were edible. Perhaps even tasty, if we believed the people who had sent us out. Probably like big chickens.
I was glad the trees were sparse. It let me get a slightly better angle… though the disembowelers were still taking cover behind trees quite frequently as they approached. They certainly had our scent now, and they were about as aggressive as expected.
I had spent most of yesterday practicing more advanced lighting spells in the local system. I wanted to know how good I could be, and how much it affected stronger magic. Chain Lightning wasn’t in the sections I’d perused, but they did have a version of Lightning Bolt. Most of the alterations involved keeping the lightning from spreading out too much. Electricity didn’t like to go where people told it.
I was most of the way through when my arm got grabbed by some tangling creepers rising up from the ground. I had anticipated that possibility. Apparently, disembowelers could control plants. However, I was still surprised because I hadn’t felt the flow of mana.
Then I realized they were screeching and flapping their arms. Were those words of magic somehow? It was possible that most of it was garbage and that beasts like them simply controlled the mana directly. But either way, their manipulation had been subtle, the magic flowing through the ground instead of through the air.
It made sense. And I would have lost the spell if I didn’t have such good mana control. My arms were yanked around and I lost my words in surprise. But I’d still gotten ninety percent of the effects, maybe down to seventy percent by the time I wrestled the spell under my control.
The bolt shot through the left flank of one of the creatures, not quite a straight line but instead curving slightly towards the second. It didn’t have the tracking capabilities of Chain Lightning, it was simply the path I’d picked ahead of time. Neither of them could really dodge, but they were moving fast enough that I didn’t quite hit them as hard as I wanted.
They were both still up, and I prepared for them to finish their charge. I’d use Stoneskin to protect myself, channeling Shocking Grasp through my staff to keep them at bay. And then- they turned to run.
Yeah that was actually the appropriate response for injured animals, wasn’t it?
I zapped the vines around me instead, causing them to spasm. I twisted, snapping more of them. Without active control, they didn’t uncoil, but they also didn’t really try to hold me.
Inasyah had transformed, leaping forward to claw at her target. I performed an improvised version of the Spatial Step spell, as actually going through the whole chant would have let my quarries get too far. It cost more mana, but it was still cheaper than Haste. No reaction time, but it provided interesting movement. Maybe I could have done both, but I’d rather test that on flat ground.
The distance literally shrank between me and my targets as I chased after them. They might have still gotten away if they weren’t injured, given they understood the terrain. If I’d had to actually catch them, they still would have made it.
But I just tossed orbs of ice that coated the area in front of them- Grease worked better with a solid surface. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t know how to handle ice. It probably never occurred naturally around here.
Once they were sliding around, I created a couple smaller blasts of lightning that knocked them out. I cracked their skulls to make sure they were dead, as I didn’t want to have to deal with it when we were dismantling them.
When I got back to Inasyah, she was all torn up. Or at least, her outer layer of clothes. Werewolves were particularly tough, though I wasn’t sure about the durability of angels. Maybe they were, or maybe they got it all from armor. They were humanoid and didn’t have skin that looked particularly strong.
Blood was dripping from her mouth. It wasn’t hers. “Can you clean me up?”
“I can’t repair things,” I commented. I did fix the blood, though. When she returned to her angelic form, I could tell she was mostly scraped up. At least she could judge her own safety correctly, though I wondered if she could have just flown up and not engaged. Then again, maybe she thought that would be boring.
Inasyah didn’t seem to care about the damaged clothing. She created an illusion over herself to look mostly normal.
-----
Three disembowelers was a threat, but it wasn’t a large enough threat that they sent border mercenaries days away from a fort to deal with. There were several more packs, from which we collected the most recognizable talons- the official requirement for the bounty- while also doing our best to gather some amount of meat and stuff. Most of us weren’t proficient with butchering animals, and we didn’t really know how to preserve things, but I figured regular casts of Clean could keep down bacterial growth.
We could get rid of anything that didn’t look good before we arrived in town. We needed to keep up some air of professionalism more than we needed to actually maximize our profits. Though we did want to try to earn sufficient money, even if we got our necessities from Earth. Never sleeping in a city would become suspicious, and our plan was to somehow get connected to the inner part of Aidura.
Between the various battles, I ended up 7 experience short of reaching level 46. I had been pretty close. The fact that they were new opponents helped, and the fact that they weren’t entirely capable of affecting me at range were probably both factors. I had to stay away from briars, or they could actually entangle me in a far worse fashion than with random roots or vines. They might not even need any of their claws for grabbing people with that magic.
Clever as they might be, though, they weren’t of human level intelligence and they were outmatched by both magic and guns. When we faced off against a larger pack of almost a dozen, guns had been very important. We wouldn’t be bringing any of those corpses back in case anyone wondered about strange holes or somehow found a bullet.
None of the teens got to fight anything notable. Though Malaliel did spot a few land devourers, and they got a rematch against those. It was probably for the best, because fencing disembowelers was probably a terrible idea- and even if Graciana’s acid worked it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for anyone. Meter was slowly being taught a real offensive spell, but he barely had any mana.
Ramen would have been fine, if he could hit them. Javelins were good for hunting, especially when enhanced by powers. As long as he didn’t get tangled by vines.
We’d have to come back later, once they had more training, but they simply weren’t ready for these yet. Though the local humans expected them to grow at an accelerated rate, nobody got better at things if they were dead.
Also I didn’t trust their assessments on anything. I couldn’t actually compare their tomes to those of the many-colored, but the fact that they’d been so unwilling to let trainees look at a book indicated they weren’t very good. They might claim ‘necessary secrecy’ but I was leaning towards incompetence instead. I wasn’t actually planning to speak to anyone from Zuresh again, though. Maybe one of the other nations if they seemed reasonable.
