NOVEL NEXT Vol 2 Ch 0: Introduction
Well, the first part ended up being longer than I expected. I guess that writing things down isn't as easy as I had initially thought. For those that have found this part, I would advise you to locate the first part. I could make a short summary but to explain everything is a royal pain, to be honest so go find the first part! If I remember correctly, I named it Agnisotra: Origin tails - Boshi town. But I keep hearing that my memory is bad so I might be wrong in that. So, the first part was about my childhood and how we arrived at a shitty town called Boshi town. My buddies Gregory, Raishin, Ted, and I were trying to escape this town but we had some problems doing this.
Who would have known that leaving a town could be such a pain in the ass? It wasn't easy to break out of that but we all got out of it alive, somewhat. Now there are some things that I didn't mention in the last part. And no! I didn't forget! Or maybe I forgot if I mentioned them. Anyways elemental magic gets formed by magic circles which are formed by household magic. The same goes for light, dark, and spatiotemporal. Now where magic users can still use earth, water, fire, lightning, and wind if they don't have the affinity for it, this is different for light, dark spatiotemporal, and other less common magic types. Since nature energy doesn't fall under magic everyone can learn it, it also doesn't require any magic circles or incantations because as I said it isn't magic. Now all isn't hopeless if one would, for example, want to use light magic but doesn't have the affinity for it. Under normal circumstances, this person would never be able to use it but this is different for attacks that have mixed or multiple elements. An example is the [Magma snake] skill I learned in the 5th time loop. It was a mix of fire and earth element. Having a poor affinity for either will affect the outcome but won't make it impossible to use.
In Gregory’s case, his poor fire affinity would make the [Magma snake] quite weak in offense and wouldn’t be able to reform when in the vicinity of magma or molten rock, which doesn’t make it all too useful. In my case, my poor earth element affinity would make it easy to defeat and it would be smaller than intended. So, with skills like this, the inability to use certain elements can more or less be bypassed. Why am I telling you this? Raishin’s [Solar Stream] is a combination of light and fire magic, meaning that I can learn it too! I can’t use light magic so this is useful! But this is also to clarify that certain magic differs in effects between individuals. Not just existing affinities but also the strength of these affinities. [Meteor] is a good example, it goes from almost useless to apocalypse-inducing depending on the user’s fire affinity. Strong magic users like Charlize or Monkey could use magic besides wind and fire but because their effectiveness and familiarity are way lower it is not mana efficient. [Fire ball] is one of the magic skills that almost every magic user knows. Despite having electronium and magic everywhere, fire will and stay something very useful and important. Even when the affinity for fire is extremely low, being able to make a small flame is still valuable. You would think other elements would have an equivalent to this but unfortunately, that isn't the case. So magic users will generally stick to the elements they have a high affinity for because it is more mana efficient and has a low to non-existent chance of failure.
Mana control also plays a role in this, it affects how successful a magic skill turns out but it also allows the user to modify their existing magic skills to a certain extent. [Water ball] can be turned into icicles, a hollow shell that can act as a barrier or even into a cloak with enough mana control. But mana control still is limited in this, some magic skills are more receptive to a certain transformation than others. [Frozen ground] can be turned into an ice ramp but at a certain point it would be easier to use [Water wall], freeze it and turn it into a ramp. I hope this makes sense. Now, something else can be done to make these. Just like almost every magic user knows [Fireball], almost everyone knows [Construction], [Deconstruction], [Reconstruction], and [Repair]. These can be used to make ice ramps too and to be honest, it is easier to use it like this. Now here is the catch, when the magic wears off, the structures disappear. It won’t melt just disappear. That is normal because when the magic wears off the situation will attempt to return to as natural as possible.
When I use [Water blast] I use the surrounding water, multiply the volume by 8 and this becomes the attack, after its executed and hits the target, the water might linger for a bit but after it wears off the water would return to how it was before I used it, so only 1/8th will stay behind. In the case of fire, things caught on fire will still continue to burn after the magic wears off but fire created by the magic will disappear, heat is still a real thing so in the case of fire magic this isn't that big of an issue. Now I learned from Rock that if I use the construction on a real volume of water it won't disappear when the magic wears off because all the water used was real, this also applies to earth magic which makes sense, water, and earth magic are the only types that use physical things to deal damage. Nobody would make a ramp made out of fire or wind but making this out of ice or earth is not abnormal. Where am I going with this? Water and earth magic’s shaped magic works differently. Well, it is still stronger but in theory shaped magic can be made with a real quantity of water or earth whit [Construction] magic without the need of knowing the magic circles for their respective skills and they will have lasting effects! I am not sure how common knowledge this is but this is a big advantage for water and earth users, I still don’t know why water is regarded as the weakest element though… Anyways this is supposed to be an introduction but I’m going off a tangent. How does one write an introduction actually? No clue.
Anyways 7 months passed after we escaped that shitty town. It is now September. Ted told Raishin and me that we needed to adjust our fighting styles because now that we were free there would be no do-overs and our fighting styles would kill most of our opponents quite easily and that would have severe consequences. Raishin was banned from using magic so Ted drilled more martial arts into him, I was only allowed to use water magic, yellow or white lightning, and dark magic. He also drilled martial arts into me just in case. He made sure we would avoid contact with any settlements before we managed to get to a satisfactory level. So, for 7 months only Ted and Gregory went into the villages to take care of supplies and the like. Something nonsensical about that we would get into trouble somehow. Gregory secured a map and we left Hjuva and went over the eastern border into Igrini Kingdom. According to our map, Boshi town was quite northwest of Hjuva. It wasn't intentional but we seemed to get as far as possible from Boshi town.