I felt a strange dizziness as I finally regained my first point of mana from the negatives, sitting on a nice couch in a magical girl safehouse. That had to be what the feeling was, because I had certainly used far more mana than I had access to. What was I even thinking, that shrinking a portal from the middle seemed cheap and easy? But at that point, I must have already pushed beyond the normal boundaries. I had surpassed all the limitations- including the ones that were meant to keep me safe.
Because while I had some mana, I recognized the same sort of lingering effects that I got from absorbing too many mana crystals. I hadn’t coughed up any black blood, but that just meant I wasn’t putting anything into my body. Instead, I’d likely taken out more than it could bear. It was a good thing that closing portals usually resulted in a flow of mana into me, or I could have been incapacitated for the rest of the day easily.
I tried to explain what I had experienced to Midnight. “It was strange,” I said. “Beyond that point, it actually became easier to retain my consciousness. But it wasn’t exactly in a good way. It was more like… my body gave up on me?” I tilted my head. “Using Alter Portal felt very natural but also problematically difficult.”
I looked at my information- though even pulling up the screen made my head flash with pain. Noted. I read what I wanted and closed it- which also hurt. I would be avoiding that for… a while.
“Hey, good news,” I said to Midnight. “I leveled up. I’m 41 now.” There weren’t really any cool thresholds I was aiming for, but levels were always good. Points and an improved mana pool and all that. I could just about use Multicasting to duplicate… Shelter. Or Dimensional Anchor, which might be either more or less useful. Though it still wasn’t quite enough for that, as my fatigue threshold was 23 and those cost 8 base. At triple cost for Multicasting, it would be short unless I relied on discounts. Maybe I was supposed to, but I didn’t like doing anything at reduced power without good reason.
“I’m glad for you,” Midnight said. “But are you alright?”
“We might have to take advantage of local hospitality for a while,” I said. “Though, your level… I think you can cast Gate alone now?” That would be fine if we weren’t going to or from anywhere difficult.
“At minimum specifications,” Midnight agreed. “Allegedly. Is it that bad?”
“The status window hurts. I spent more mana than I should have been able to. Than I should have had.”
Midnight pondered for a moment. “Do you think it’s something about this dimension.”
“No. Maybe?” I tilted my head. Then I un-tilted it because movement hurt. “Still no. I haven’t really seen anything work differently except for when breaking away from my original world. But I suppose I can test this on our Earth.”
Midnight grimaced. “Based on your current state, that sounds like an awful idea.”
I stopped myself from nodding. “Probably, but we need to know. I refuse to let magical secrets rest.”
“... Maybe you can just ask someone?”
“The only mage I trust is in hiding. Even if it’s not strictly a mage issue, Sir Kalman doesn’t seem to have the answers, so that limits the numbers of those I trust in general. And Lyklor seemed content to live with the system as it was.”
Midnight roamed around on the back of the couch. That was about the highest he would normally go aside from my shoulder. “It probably makes sense for elves. Assuming they live longer?”
“Sure, but they also gain experience more slowly, I think.”
“Does that matter?” Midnight asked. “Lemme do some math here. If they gain a single point of experience each day for, say, two hundred years, assuming nothing changes from the numbers you told me…” A little screen flipped down in front of his eye from his reshaping tech-suit. “They’d hit something like level 170.”
“Okay. So like… 4 times my current level. That’s a lot but…”
“And they’d have about 16 times your points.”
“That would explain why Lyklor could have so many upgrades for something kind of trivial,” I admitted. “They might not be able to continue gaining experience like that?”
“Maybe not. But even at half that rate they’d still easily end up with something like ten times your current points.”
“Hmm.” I had been feeling pretty strong, but I supposed even if I was growing quickly it wasn’t weird that there would be people who far outclassed me just given the time they’d spent. I just hadn’t thought about it that far because I’d surpassed the expected level for once. “What do you even do with that?”
“I don’t know,” Midnight admitted. “Something has to change, though, or people could end up with… concerning levels of power.”
“In what way?” I asked.
“Looking at Firebolt, for example. Our smallest offensive spell. Using that as the base, according to your numbers, at 200 points worth of upgrades- which would be 65 of them- it would do damage similar to Chain Lightning, at a cost of 2 mana.”
“Well… but Chain Lightning can hit at least 6 or 7 people. And you could upgrade that.”
“You could, but it would only be about a third as mana efficient. Which would certainly still be worthwhile, but the point is… if you put an excessive amount of points into a single ability it can be concerningly strong.”
“So you’re saying I should try that,” I said.
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“I- no? Please don’t start putting points into something low tier.”
“Status hurts,” I said. “So I’d do it later. After looking at the math.”
“Right,” Midnight rolled his eyes. “But I assume something must change at some point. Or your world has some extremely terrifying individuals.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I hadn’t heard about anything like that. But even if they can make a Firebolt match a base Chain Lightning at 200 points… so what?”
“At 1000 points-”
“I don’t even have that many total yet,” I interrupted.
“But some people do. And at that point, Firebolt is as strong as Chain Lightning at its base mana cost of basically nothing. Or something like 15-20 times as strong if you spend just 2 mana. The numbers just get more concerning if you keep going.”
“... Yeaaah that has to stop eventually, right?” I asked. “Lyklor only had like, 20 upgrades. Maybe that’s the limit.”
“Do you believe that?” Midnight asked.
“Not without testing it,” I admitted. “Which I can do. Once we’re back in the right world and all that.”
“I’m not a huge fan of that idea,” Midnight said. “What if you break something?”
“How could I break anything? Either it works or it doesn’t.”
“Or you go past an unspoken limit and cripple yourself,” Midnight pointed out.
“... maybe I’ll add the ranks one at a time over the course of a few days. But I do need to see if I can find a limit.”
“What if the limit is your actual level?” Midnight suggested. “That would be… just as unreasonable, actually.”
“I could test that next level.”
“At the price of it using the majority of your points,” Midnight pointed out.
“... only a little more than the total we’ve spent on Gate.”
“Well, as long as you actually think about it, I think it might be worth testing. We could come out of it with a very powerful small scale spell, if nothing goes wrong.”
-----
Later that afternoon, after having put together a number of charts with Midnight and seeing how theoretical mana efficiency matched up with theoretical damage, some patterns became clear. Somewhere around 100 points invested, mana efficiency per damage began to climb down from the top rank spells. At 150, it was pretty much fully in the hands of the lowest ranked spells. Of course, that came with various assumptions about the type of spell being similar.
For example, Shocking Grasp would be about twice as effective because its requirements for touching were more efficient at imparting magical force upon targets, while Chain Lightning ended up at about half because of it being a wide area spell. That also meant that the total potential ‘damage’ that wide area spells could cause would still be more mana efficient after a certain number of targets… but it resolved some issues and brought up others.
Ultimately, we didn’t know if it actually worked that way. We’d only been able to test spells with relatively low amounts of upgrades- Force Armor at 11 being hard to test since it was defensive, and Firebolt at 8 being a total point cost of 27 which was far short of the breakpoints we were looking at.
“Maybe we were thinking about this wrong,” I said. “I thought people were hiding natural upgrades, but maybe they were really trying to stop people from thinking too much about the upgrade system in general? Focused training could save me some points here and there, but specialized point spending might be even more of a concern. Or training to get a few extra ranks and then spending a whole bucket of points might be the actual strategy.”
I looked up as the door opened, revealing Momo walking in with a tray. “What strategy?” she asked.
“Breaking magic.”
“Why would you wish to break magic?” she asked as she approached. “I thought you enjoyed your abilities.”
“I meant more like… breaking the limits? The rules? Something like that.”
“... You seem a bit young to transcend the limitations of reality,” Momo commented. “But I suppose I’ve seen some pretty amazing things from you. Like those portals.”
The tray in her hand was full of… rice? Covered in some green stuff.
“The portals are still well within expected limits,” I said. Though, it was true that I was about halfway to one theoretical breakpoint. Or perhaps fully there if one considered the natural upgrades I had for Gate. 5 total upgrades for a rank 20 spell should be about 150 points, counting the base cost. “What are those?” I asked, looking at the rice things.
“A rice ball. Since I thought you must be hungry by now,” Momo said. “Are you certain you are alright? Normally you would have absconded back to your version of Earth in mere moments.”
“I learned a lot,” I said, reaching for the tray she had set down. I picked the food up with my hand without thinking about whether or not I should. Momo didn’t seem to react, though. “It just happens to be that sometimes the best learning happens among difficulties.”
I bit into the rice ball thing- which wasn’t a ball but a sort of triangle. Maybe the translation didn’t quite fit Common. What had the actual word been… onigiri? The green stuff was papery and salty but still tasty, and there was meat in the center.
“Very well,” Momo commented. “Mister Familiar,” her words were spoken carefully to use Midnight’s code name, though it probably didn’t matter in this world and especially not in the safehouse. “You are able to eat non meat products, correct?”
“Some,” Midnight agreed.
“Then I would be honored if you would eat these onigiri. Some have tuna.”
The word stopped translating once I decided I knew what it meant and liked the other word better. English words almost never translated for me anymore, though I still had it active all the time because Midnight couldn’t form humanoid words without it, and it was just as efficient to cast it on both of us.
Midnight eagerly sought out the tuna, sniffing the onigiri. He used his suit to properly grab one, halfheartedly chewing through the rice until he got to the center. We were both hungry, so we finished off the whole tray fairly quickly. Momo looked uncertain that she had brought enough.
“You have… quite the appetite.”
“I’m big,” I pointed out. And maybe going into negative mana made me more hungry. I honestly didn’t know because I was eating different food, and I had to support my size and muscle.
Just to test, I opened my status window. It didn’t hurt anymore. Midnight and I could probably go home around sundown, unless he wanted to try it alone first. But for that we’d need to do a test portal to make sure he could properly maintain consciousness at exactly his fatigue threshold, and we weren’t certain that wouldn’t attract unwanted attention.
So later it would be, when I could summon up a few points of mana without feeling like I was being stabbed. Especially since Midnight would feel the secondhand pain.
