Chapter 13: Pew Pew Pew

The barrier ended up being repaired after 20 minutes—10 minutes for Lens to go off and find a sculpting hobbyist, and 10 minutes to come back with the gal and a chisel to poke a tiny dot off the stone face.

“By the goddesses, it actually works.” Lens gawked at the happily-humming magic circles. She tossed a rock at several points, causing the otherwise-invisible barrier to shimmer like hot air as the rocks bounced off of it. “It’s all good, now. Huh.” She scratched her head, looking at the barrier, before looking to Kalender—but behind him, Jyn held a sharp look, which shouted ‘You owe us now,’ to which Lens replied with a stiff smile, ‘Y-yeah, gotchya.’

Kalender was too preoccupied ooh-ing and woah-ing at the barrier to notice their wordless conversation. What he really wanted to know was if tossing someone at the barrier would constitute a “physical projectile”—which was what the magic circles said it actually blocked, but it was hard to find volunteers for stuff like that.

As a small thanks for their help, Lens told them they could have the field to themselves for an hour before she announced its reopening. Kalender and Jyn thanked her, and she went on her way.

“So, do I just look through Page’s Collections and test them out?” Kalender asked.

Jyn shook her head. “Save your MP. I can teach you some of the ordinary combat spells for now.”

“… So we didn’t need a spell library?”

“I only know some spells, so I was hoping you would review the Collections you received on our downtime—especially the one on Adventuring Magics. Those should be rather versatile compared to whatever I learned as a knight.”

Just like reading code documentation on a coffee break, huh.

Jyn continued. “Now, the spells I know are some of the more basic spells, and we were only ever taught those that are supposed to be used in mass volleys with little accuracy.”

“Supposed to? So … they can be accurate, right?” It’d be useless, otherwise.

“Yes. Mages among adventurers tend to use the same spells, albeit with more intentional aim. We can start with those.”

Knights and adventurers alike used the so-called elemental attack magics: fire, earth, wind, water, ice, and light. Even if the Theory of Elemental Magic has been dropped in favor of some fancier-sounding other theory, most people in practical fields still speak in terms of elemental magic, if only because it’s just far easier to imagine.

“Let me guess, we’re starting with -ball spells?” Kalender guessed.

“Pfsh, no. That’s an order of magnitude too destructive, especially for adventurers.”

Apparently, fireball spells were considered the equivalent to hand grenades. You wouldn’t use a hand grenade on a poor wolfbeast.

Instead, Jyn taught him about the bullet spells. She cleared some paces and aimed her palm downrange. After this, she hoped that maybe Kalender could tell her what the chant was actually saying. It could be an auto-combusting recipe for baking a muffin, for all she knew.

“I’ll launch one, now. Listen well. {Shoot a bullet of fire}.”

As expected, a coin-sized ball of fire accumulated in front of her palm and shot forwards, about as fast as an arrow and as quiet as the hoarse hissing of a lit gas oven. It hit the berm on the other side of the field, ending in a small flash and kicking up some dirt, about as much a modern rifle would—which begged the question: Could you one-shot someone with it?

Even if it didn’t actually do much kinetic damage, fire being practically weightless, the possibility of slow-roasting someone in plate armor with a generous peppering of flame bullets was scary.

“Did you listen properly?” Jyn asked. “What did it say?”

“It’s literally just ‘Shoot a bullet of fire.’”

Relief washed over Jyn. It was a completely ordinary chant… Anyway, she was here to teach Kalender how to stay alive.

“Each flame bullet costs 0.2 MP,” she continued. “As brief and thrifty the chant is, all the time it takes from chanting to activation makes it too slow to use in close combat.”

Kalender recalled the short moment it took for the coin-sized fireball—fire-bullet—to accumulate before being launched. That must’ve been the activation.

“At the same time, the bullet moves too slowly for long range, so the optimal range of usage is quite stuck in the middle distances.”

Kalender nodded along. The bullet did take about 2 seconds to cross 40 meters to the other side of the range. “It looked pretty strong, though. It kicked up all that dirt, and all,” he remarked. It really looked as strong as a rifle to him.

Jyn shook her head. “What you saw was the water erupting to steam from the soil. In my experience, its power is so paltry, that it will not even stop a shirtless bandit from charging at you.” She remembered that experience clearly—she was swearing at her even as the spell slammed into her.

She continued. “In physical terms, it can char a small area of unprotected skin and leave the surrounding heavily-burned. Anyone in armor held together by cloth or leather will find their straps crumbling off, and anyone in plate will find that their armor can become ovens.”

Wait, so the slow-roasting tactic is real?

"The damage, on any level, is certainly real, otherwise it would not make for a good skirmish magic. Anyone would definitely avoid receiving one, but it has no force behind it, which is another reason not to use it at close range.

“Practically, we would use it to distract or confuse human opponents at skirmish range. If you are faced with archers and you have none of your own, it is also a good fallback. In case of mana beasts, it does well against slimes and pesky needlers.”

“Sorry? Did you say ‘needlers’? Are they annoying? They sound annoying.”

“Very. They’re like porcupines, but they can shoot a spread of needles at you at close range. Unless you have full-body protection, at least one of those needles will find their way in you. Outranging them with bullets is best.”

“Huh. Neat.” Finally, he had a potential opponent that he had no moral qualms about shooting magic at. This was all the unneeded self-justification he needed. “Let me try!”

They traded places, and Kalender put his palm up. “{Shoot a bullet of fire}!”

He put 0.2 MP into it, and almost like a mirror copy of Jyn’s execution, a coin-sized ball of fire manifested and shot forwards like an arrow.

“Cool.” He wanted to keep shooting, but he also wanted to do other things. “Mind if I experiment a bit? Just with the bullet spell.”

Jyn smirked. “Don’t blow up the field.” Not like he could with just 10 MP, anyway.

Alright! The first thing he wanted to do was test out his “context is important” theory of chanting.

His chosen independent variable? The shape of his hand.

He held out a finger gun. Jyn cocked an eyebrow.

“{Shoot a bullet of fire}.”

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Faster than a blink, a tiny candle flame manifested from the tip of his pointer finger, and shot away at a speed so fast that it looked like a line of light from where Jyn stood. The activation time was nearly non-existent.

The impact on the dirt across the field was imperceptible, but the speed at which the candle flame manifested was magnitudes faster than the coin-sized bullet that the original, palm-based usage of the chant created.

Best of all, it didn’t feel like he’d even put in 0.1 MP. It felt more like 0.05 MP.

To better test its power, he shot it again at the ground in front of him. In a word, the impact was a resounding poof. It kicked up some steam, about as much as a water kettle’s first puff.

“But … why?” Jyn couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry. I can’t find a use for this in a fight. If you could rapidly fire it, it would do very well in both close and far ranges as harrassment, but the chant is simply too long and the power too low.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” Kalender smiled. “I’ll do something about that.”

“{Prepare five bullets of fire}.”

Five candle flames stacked on top of each other, the topmost one hovering in front of his pointer finger.

“{Shoot} {Shoot} {Shoot} {Shoot} {Shoot}”

Each time, tracers flashed downrange. Jyn just stared at the result, unable to say anything to gleeful face Kalender was showing her.

Most of the MP cost was in the preparation stage. There was quite some MP drain as he held the spell, so it wasn’t something he could keep constantly “loaded” all the time. Still, it was fun to sort-of kind-of have a working finger gun.

“The slimes are in danger…” she muttered under her breath. It wouldn’t take a genius to imagine this technique being generalized to other spells.

Even with this, however, Kalender was still lacking in attack power.

Among the bullet and ball spells, fire was most versatile, but only because it was easy to manifest for the amount of physical and psychological damage it did. Still, it was nearly immaterial, and had little inertia or penetrative power.

For inertia or penetration attacks, adventurers went for other elemental magics: earth, wind, water, and ice;

Earth was strongest, the general-purpose monster-stopper.

Wind, though weakest, had the fastest activation and least MP cost—after all, air was everywhere.

Water had balanced performance—inferior to earth in power, but faster to activate, though not as fast as wind.

Finally, ice for emergencies—the slowest activation of all, and the highest MP cost, requiring the freezing of ambient moisture, it still had power similar to earth. It was the rarest to see in use among the bullet and -ball spells, but ice users wouldn’t use ice for direct attacks in the first place.

Generally, one would use these elemental magics only if the concerned element was naturally available; conjuring the required substances spiked the MP cost.

The last element, light, was a bit special. It was mostly for utility and illumination. To use it for attack, one needed a way to focus the light beam from the {Shine a beam of light} chant, which was usually done with lenses made from ice magic. If done right, a system of lenses placed in prepared areas could dominate the battlefield. If done right.

Kalender wondered why laser spells didn’t exist. You wouldn’t need fancy lenses if you could just shoot lasers out of your eyes.

Before he could elaborate on that thought, Jyn prompted him to try out some of the inertia attack magics. He grabbed a fistful of silt and came to the conclusion that pocket sand was the strongest, after all.

“What on Gaia are you talking about?” Jyn saw a ludicrous child—or a madman, depending.

With that handful of dirt and a short application of {Make this into a marble}, he’d made a shiny little glazed clay bullet.

Jyn shook her head. Anything’s possible when you can just make up spells when you need them, huh… At least Kalender wasn’t making anything that they couldn’t explain away with “We bought it.” People already ordinarily made clay bullets in batches in workshops that used autoclave magic circles, specifically as ammunition for bullet spells.

The performance was sort of bad. It took him 0.5 MP to make a small marble, and another 0.3 MP to launch it. Compared to Jyn’s 0.2 MP flame palm bullet, it took a lot more in total to send a marble downrange. Still, with how hefty a marble was, and at the speed it was going, it’d probably kill a dude if it hit them straight in the face. Getting hit anywhere else would probably be just as gruesome.

At least he could make the marbles during his downtime—or just buy them, like Jyn suggested a few seconds later.

She also told him that the actual shape people used for baked clay bullets was closer to a slightly-flattened marble, cementing his belief that these things were actually military-grade ammunition.

“Knights who can use even a bit magic do carry a few clay bullets precisely for how effective they are,” she explained. Welp, that’s confirmed.

Kalender continued experimenting with the other elements, save for ice. After being told that an ice palm bullet took a whole 2 MP, he noped out of it.

The water bullet was—okay. It was sort of funny to be holding a waterskin while holding out a finger gun, like the waterskin was some sort of magazine. It was a cheap option, for sure, since he could shoot out water finger bullets for 0.1 MP—which were decently scary, like having a metal-cutting water jet turned on for a split second. It’d probably hurt quite a bit, but it wasn’t cutting deeply into soil. It just scattered harmlessly any farther than 5 meters, too, so he couldn’t make it his go-to—not as a weapon, at least.

Apparently, the palm bullet version sort of just slapped the target with all the force of a thrown brick, but without the hard edge, which made it popular as a nonlethal option.

The wind palm bullet was much like the water version, but it didn’t travel very far, and it was more like stuffing the brick into the core of a pillow before throwing it, which made it even more popular as a nonlethal option. Since it was safe, Jyn offered to shoot it straight at Kalender, and the idiot agreed.

Unfortunately for her, he found it fun. Unfortunately for her, Kalender’s finger gun version ended up having all the force of nudging someone, and he severely enjoyed nudging Jyn with it. Unfortunately for her, wind bullets cost quite less than their fire counterparts—0.02 MP for the finger gun version. Finally, unfortunately for her, Kalender figured out that {Pew} worked in place of {Shoot}, and it needed no translation to understand.

So she ended up actively deflecting air-nudge bullets with a sword, against a guy shouting “Pew pew pew—I’m gonna hug ya if I get to ya! Pew pew pew,” ignoring her protests and chasing her around the field.

They kept at it for quite a while, until he ran out of steam and collapsed on all fours. When Jyn walked closer to check on him, he wrapped his arms around her, reduced to a sobbing mess.

“Why am I in this mess? Why?! Jyn, you’re my only friend! Please don’t leave me!”

It took a moment for the confused Jyn to figure out that he’d zeroed out his MP and fallen into an acute depression.

***

Lens’s eyebrows turned tilde as she watched the pair pass by in the distance, with Jyn gently patting a sobbing Kalender on the head.

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