Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Arriving at the information hub, Emily, Tom, and Hester all step out of the transportation room into the open hall. Emily walks towards a counter without anyone standing before it.

“Hello, how can I help you?” the female clerk behind the counter says with a friendly smile.

“I’m here to claim a spell?” Emily questions, unsure of the exact answer to give.

“Sure, what is your name?” the clerk asks while pulling a receiver crystal out from under the counter.

“Emily Coldstone.”

The clerk closes her eyes and injects mana into the crystal. After a few moments, she opens her eyes with a nod.

“Your first spell will be given for free, what element would you like?”

“Fire please.”

“Sure, one moment please.”

The clerk turns around and walks to the bank of drawers behind her, opening a few before returning with a sheet of parchment and a silver slab with complicated runes and a few crystals of different colours embedded onto its surface. She places the slab onto the counter with the parchment laid carefully on top of it before injecting it with mana and closing her eyes.

The slab lights up with a blend of blue, green and red, as red letters slowly bleed through the page. After ten seconds of channelling, the clerk opens her eyes and removes the parchment from the slab. Carefully rolling it up, she hands the parchment to Emily and picks up the slab.

“Will that be all?”

“Yes, thank you.” Emily steps to the side to allow Tom access to the counter as she unrolls the parchment to take a look. Before she finishes opening the parchment, the clerk calls out to her.

“Ah, please don’t look at spells in public areas. While that’s only a first circle spell, it’s bad practice to risk letting another see it.”

Right, don’t do that next time.

Emily stands idly, waiting impatiently for Tom and Hester to finish as a realisation strikes her.

I don’t need to keep up appearances if I’m going to reset, do I?

With her mind made up, Emily quickly walks back towards the transportation rooms, leaving Tom and Hester confused. She makes her way back to her room and settles at her desk with the spell parchment laid out before her.

Unravelling the paper, Emily finds a simple magic circle drawn.

The circle has five runes around its inner edge, some held within circles or other geometric shapes. Throughout the circle are several lines woven together in interconnected arcs, connecting some of the runes.

At the top of the paper, the name ‘Burning Hands’ is proudly written, and at the bottom, the chant:

 

Coat my palms with the fires of unrest

and sear my enemies with burning flesh.

 

Yikes, that sounds stupid. Do I have to say it every time I cast?

Choosing to ignore the chant for now, Emily stares at the magic circle in detail, memorising the runes and their placement. The moment she finishes, a new system window pops up.

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Spell memorised: Burning Hands

Sub-system unlocked: Spellbook

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She quickly opens her status page and finds a new tab at the top.

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[Spellbook]

First Circle:

-Burning Hands

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Burning Hands]

[Circle:] First

[Cost:] 30 Mana/cast

[Description:] Summon a layer of flames across the palms for ten seconds.

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It didn’t record the chant.

Noting the peculiarity, she shoves the thought aside and begins focusing on the spell to try and activate it like a skill. After a few moments of focusing on the spell, she realises that nothing is happening.

What was the Spellbook for then? I can already remember the spell, though I guess it was like this with the blueprint tab. I’ll have to work out how to cast the spell myself.

Considering Jenny’s emphasis on mental images, Emily closes her eyes and pictures her orange and white flames. Imagining the flames coating the palm of her hand, she says the chant aloud.

“Coat my palms with the fires of unrest, and sear my enemies with burning flesh.”

Opening her eyes, she sees her bare hands before her without a change.

Okay so the chant itself doesn’t do anything. Runes it is.

Focusing on the spell name again, the magic circle instantly appears in her mind. Willing mana into the mental picture like with manifestation, she feels her mana leave her body through her hands and opens her eyes. Floating in the air before her is a blue, faintly glowing matrix of runes and lines. Waiting for a few moments with an expectant gaze, Emily is disappointed when the construct does nothing and collapses as she stops supplying mana.

I could have guessed that wouldn’t work. I probably need the runes and mental image.

Shutting her eyes again, she pictures a flame-covered palm. Holding the image, she starts thinking of the spell’s magic circle. Pushing mana into both concepts at once, she feels a stronger flow of mana and opens her eyes to see the spell’s runes forming in a blazing, white-tinged orange before her.

As she watches the runes slowly solidify from a translucent haze, she notices the edges of the runes fraying and losing their shape, and the lines between them breaking and reforming constantly. Worriedly she shuts her eyes again and focuses on the two images in her mind that had begun to fade. After twenty seconds of channelling mana, she feels the flow stop and opens her eyes to see her palms covered in a thin sheen of shimmering flames.

Excitedly, she reaches forward and picks up the spell parchment, smiling with glee as it ignites and quickly burns to ashes.

“I cast magic!”

She moves her hands around and watches the faint flaming trails left in their wake. Ripping a few pages out of her notebook and watching them burn too, Emily is disappointed when the flames vanish.

Wait that was only about five seconds.

Frowning, she opens her status to check her mana.

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[Mana:] 323/345

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Hmm, it was meant to cost 30.

Leaning back in her chair, Emily bites her thumb.

Is that lack of mana usage from my failed first attempts, the final spell failing, or something else? Wait a second.

Struck with an idea, she checks her system skill list and pulls up the description of a skill she has been ignoring.

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[Magic Network (passive)]

A unique energy system created by User {Emily Coldstone} with the combination of [Magic Circuit] and [Neuro Net]. The mana channels carved into the body's vascular system to form a magic circuit have fused with the host’s neurological pathways creating a vastly enhanced energy distribution system.

-Grants +100% to mana and machina regeneration

-Grants -50% mana and machina usage

-Grants +20% mental resistance

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Reduced mana usage! However, it’s still using more than 50% of the spell cost.

To confirm her suspicions, she follows the same process and casts Burning Hands again. She checks her mana when the spell fades away after six seconds.

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[Mana:] 303/345

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It lasted slightly longer that time, and it used 20 mana. I guess the failed attempts were using up mana then. Makes sense, I am moving mana out of my body, I just didn’t think to check during class. But does that time and mana cost difference mean I’m failing to cast the spell correctly, or just not casting it perfectly?

Emily picks up her quill and begins scribbling notes into her notebook.

 

Need mental image

-Can be assisted with chant?

Need runes drawn

-No known shortcut

Current casting time is too long to be useful in a fight.

System gives ideal? results from spell cast, try to match system description before using.

 

Gazing at the notes and tapping her fingers on the desk, Emily drops her quill.

First, let’s test using a chant and no mental image. If it lets me use the spell properly, I may have to swallow my pride for a bit till I learn how to mentally multi-task.

She begins casting the spell again, this time holding the magic circle in her mind and pouring mana into it as she speaks slowly:

“Coat my palms with the fires of unrest…”

Burning orange runes spring to life around her hands.

“…and sear my enemies with burning flesh.”

Her palms ignite with flames. However, the orange of the flames is a noticeably duller hue, and the white streaks are missing. Emily moves her hands around and also sees the lack of shimmering trail. To her pleasant surprise, the spell fades after eight seconds and a quick glance at her mana likewise gives hope.

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[Mana:] 286/345

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So, chanting removed the interference of my mental image with the rune formation, at the cost of a much weaker mental image. Preferably I’d want a way of simplifying the rune formation so I could keep the complexity of my image, my original fire seems much stronger than this.

Looking back down at her notes, her eyes are drawn towards her word choice on the second statement.

 

Need runes drawn

 

Drawn? Could I draw the runes with my hands instead of in my mind?

Emily holds up her right hand with her pointer finger out and pushes a steady stream of mana into it. Moving the finger slowly, she draws out the shape of the first rune; a small grin growing as she sees the mana burned into the air before her holding its shape.

Finishing the first flickering rune, Emily draws a small circle around the rune and sees it solidifying completely as she does. Continuing in the same stroke, she draws the large circle to encapsulate the whole spell and sees the rune’s border solidify in shape too.

Good, it’s holding together.

After a dozen seconds of careful drawing, Emily holds her hand to the centre of the finished circle and maintains a small mana flow as she forms her mental image of the spell. Feeling a small connection form in her mind, the circle ignites from the centre. As soon as the flames reach the outer edge, the circle begins rotating and fades out of existence as a dense burning layer appears over her palms.

She reaches for her notebook to test, and instead of ripping out a few pages, her touch instantly ignites a dozen layers of paper. She quickly releases the book and waves her sleeves over it to extinguish the flames, saving the rest of the book from being destroyed.

“Haha, now this is magic!” She gleefully chuckles to herself, staring at the glittering trails left behind by her fingers as she weaves them through the air.

This time the spell fades after a full ten seconds, and Emily leans back with a satisfied grin.

The spell appears as if it’s meant to be built in parts. Every time I finished one stroke, it held together its predecessor. Is that how it’s meant to be cast then? Now that I think about it, whenever Jose or Miguel cast spells, the runes always formed around them in sequence and were already coloured with their element. I guess picturing the whole magic circle at once is probably quite difficult when they get more complicated.

Leaning back over her notebook, Emily grabs her quill and moves to a page not stained by ash. In the centre of the page, she draws Burning Hands’ magic circle. Placing the quill down next to it, she holds both her hands over the first rune and curiously begins trying to line her fingers up to form the rune.

After a couple of seconds, she manages to find an odd position with her thumbs bent inwards and touching, and her pointer fingers flat against each other. Her middle fingers are crossed, with her right ring finger curled under her left, tucked into her left palm. Her right pinkie is in line with her middle finger, and her left is curled, forming a circle with the right.

Holding this odd shape in front of her, she pulses mana through each finger that forms a line of the rune, ignoring those that overlap with others. The rune forms across her hands, and with a light flick of her wrists, it floats to hover above her hands. Moving quickly, she unravels her fingers and splays her hands with thumbs and pointer fingers joined to create a circle. With another quick pulse of mana and a slight gesture upwards, the circle rises and sets itself into place around the rune, holding it together.

Grinning, she moves her hands apart and rotates each in a half-circle with a small flow of mana out of her palms. Bringing her hands back together, Emily pauses before the next rune, unsure of how to continue. She stops supplying mana to the circle and lets it fade, then picks up her quill and draws a diagram of the first rune’s hand sign.

For the next few hours, Emily gets lost in creating and optimising hand signs and movements for all of the runes and lines within the magic circle. A couple of hours after ignoring Juliana’s knock on her door for lunch, Emily sits back, gazing with a satisfied smile at the list of hand signs drawn on a page before her.

Bringing her hands up, she starts forming a mental image of her palms on fire as she quickly weaves her hands in a delicate and precise dance of gestures and shapes. After nine seconds, she slaps her palms together, and the glistening orange and white magic circle around her hands roars to life. Pulling her hands apart, she sees her successful spell burning away happily.

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Skill created: Basic Gesture Casting (passive)

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Ignoring the system pop-up and watching the flames till they fade; Emily nods her head and grins at the full ten-second duration.

Perfect, if I can memorise these hand motions and turn them into muscle memory, I should be able to cast this spell in five or so seconds!