Ignoring the coughing men, he took a moment to bask in the warm sunlight, and to take a few deep breaths of the cool, salty breeze, appreciating his leisurely stroll along the coast. His host didn’t know where exactly their destination was, but according to the others there was still some ground left to cover.
For Marnok and his crewmates, this island might very well be a deathtrap, but for Micky, it was just the beautiful setting for another of his many adventures – one of the more relaxing ones too.
‘I should still try to get the new spell down before we enter the jungle,’ he reminded himself.
The concealment rune might save Marnok’s life later. While Micky wasn’t above enjoying his time here, he wasn’t going to willingly sabotage his new buddy’s survival prospects out of laziness or nonchalance.
He turned his attention back to the half-formed enchantment inside his host’s core. As difficult as it was to control one’s mana internally, Micky was more than a little skilled at doing precisely that. His elemental body on Remior had to do something similar every time he wanted to shift his ice mana between its three states, and that was without taking into account all the other permutations of pre-casting that he could apply in battle.
On top of that, drawing a single rune was pretty much the simplest expression of magiscript possible, even without his spectral trait helping him. With it, shaping the air mana into the circular symbol was more than manageable.
‘Drawing the rune isn’t the problem,’ he noted. ‘The biggest issue is the rest of the mana messing the enchantment up.’
Mana cores contained a mage’s entire reserves, holding enough power to conjure up some pretty violent spells even as early as Yellow – let alone the higher grades. And all of that energy was normally stored inside a volume no larger than a strawberry. Consequently, even the slightest push could cause the mana to thrash wildly inside the organ.
This was why pre-casting was so difficult to master in the first place – manipulating the mana with any finesse required a gentle touch. Things were still simple when it came to more straightforward transformations like rotations or splitting the flow into multiple parts, but even the most basic runes had a relatively intricate shape.
Worse still, while Micky’s trait helped him control the mana tied to the enchantment, it had nothing to say about the rest of his reserves. Then again, that was only to be expected, given its description.
___
- [Scribing] – Boosts one’s proclivity in expressing meaning onto any written medium.
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Thankfully, Scribing was rather lax when determining what counted as a “written medium”, having allowed Micky to do all sorts of interesting things with it in the past. However, the definition didn’t seem to extend to indirect help – it could force the mana into the correct shape, but it couldn’t prevent a separate stream of mana from distorting it.
‘It’s ridiculous that I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about the environment disturbing the enchantments…’ he lamented, the corner of his host’s lips curling into a bitter frown. ‘There’s no worse environment than the interior of a mana core!’
There was a silver lining, however. Micky had once again discovered how profound the Vault’s runecrafting language was. The circular runes fit neatly inside the spherical core, making use of every square millimetre of its cross-section. Had he used any other language, he would have had to make the runes smaller to make them fit, weakening their effects and wasting space.
He was pretty sure that it was just a coincidence. He didn’t think that Metatron knew about pre-casting, and he sure hoped that the titan hadn’t even considered the possibility of elevating Circulation into an artificial promotion.
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‘As long as Tlaloc and Leo keep their mouths shut about the Dance, it would be too great a leap of logic.’
Then again, it was entirely possible that Micky’s friends had already let the information slip. Perhaps, he shouldn’t be underestimating Metatron’s ingenuity either.
Whether the god had realized it or not, he already had access to many of the tools that Micky was planning to use in his project. The only ones that he might lack were the spectral traits and the alchemic principles, but Metatron could still potentially find workarounds.
‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now. Even if he gets there before I do, it won’t affect me immediately. As long as I can become a god, I’ll be able to deal with him one day.’
Either way, Micky already knew the titan’s main reasons for building his entire runecrafting language on circular shapes, and they had nothing to do with mana cores. It made the enchantments simpler to draw and easier to stack together – both things that Micky had grown to greatly appreciate after years of experience in the field.
Regardless of Metatron’s motivations, Micky had to admit that the runes were practically perfect for what he wanted to do. Even if he stopped holding the enchantments in place, they would be able to keep spinning inside the core with no obstruction.
‘Wait… Spinning? That could work!’ he thought, causing his host’s heart to skip a beat.
Micky had been trying way too hard to keep the runes still, but that only made it more difficult for them to weather the violent flows of mana inside the organ. What if he stopped resisting and just allowed the symbols to rotate freely?
Deciding to give that a shot, he repaired the damaged enchantment once more, this time letting go of the circle’s circumference. Like a flicked coin, the rune began revolving rapidly, falling apart within mere seconds. This was precisely what Micky had feared would happen, though he keenly noticed that the symbol had survived a little longer than his previous attempts.
Seeing that his latest idea had merit, he repeated his actions, adjusting his mindset slightly. He couldn’t afford to let go of the rune entirely, or it would crumble on the spot. He still had to put some effort into keeping it intact, though he should probably avoid squeezing it as tightly.
‘Its shape has to stay fixed, but its angular momentum and orientation don’t really matter.’
The second attempt went a little better, the rune lasting for over five seconds before getting ripped apart. Thankfully, the wind crashing against it didn’t apply as much pressure when Micky allowed the symbol to move freely, though a new problem soon presented itself.
Focusing on the enchantment was difficult. It revolved dozens – if not hundreds – of times per second, and it did so randomly, in all three dimensions.
Micky was only able to hold on to the rune for a while due to his trait. Unlike the conscious part of his mind that struggled to keep track of the construct, the instincts granted to him by Scribing didn’t seem to care about whether the symbol was upside-down, flipped horizontally, or spinning.
Leaning into that feeling, Micky stopped trying to sense the rune directly. Ignoring the feeling in his host’s chest entirely, he allowed a static picture of the concealment rune to form in his mind – a perfect representation of the enchantment inside his core, stripped of the movements.
He could still feel how the symbol was being affected by its surroundings, but he had essentially aligned his thoughts with the rune’s frame of reference. He experienced the erratic air mana slamming into the construct as a series of violent gales, hitting it from every direction in an attempt to tear it down.
‘They feel weaker than before though,’ he realized, suppressing the urge to grin.
Ten seconds passed. The enchantment remained intact as Micky shattered his previous record. The gales didn’t just crash onto the rune, however. They also collided with one another, brewing a chaotic storm inside the organ.
The enchantment wasn’t spinning at a fixed speed, nor in a single direction. It constantly accelerated and decelerated, its rotation fluctuating wildly from one moment to the next. Every major shift threatened to throw Micky off, and to undo the symbol’s structure, each sudden change impossible to predict or prepare for.
Micky was hanging on for dear life, like a boat trying to stay afloat atop a tumultuous ocean. He filtered all the detrimental information out, concentrating on nothing but the rune itself as he poured his mind into keeping every last stroke of the magical symbol in place. Whenever the shape felt like it was about to twist, he clamped down on it just a touch harder, letting go again as soon as the storm eased.
A minute passed, and then another – he guessed so at least, though he was too preoccupied with the difficult task to keep track. Micky’s mind constantly alternated between tense and relaxed, almost as if he was wrestling with a tireless hurricane – struggling to block its violent blows with everything he had.
Thankfully, the situation improved markedly over time. It never got easy per se, but it did get a little easier after a while.
About an hour in, Micky wasn’t as worried about the enchantment falling apart anymore. Maintaining its shape still required a lot of effort, but he was feeling increasingly confident that he could keep it up for a very long time if he didn’t break focus, and his Status seemed to agree with that assessment.
[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Spectral Art: Internal Runecrafting – Refined!]
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