Mage Among Superheroes

The magical development goals I had were simple. I wanted another advanced form like Divination. It would allow me to do so much, and show me that it wasn't just a fluke and a giant diamond scrying 'orb' that got me that mastery. I didn't necessarily want to be good at Divination, but I did want to be good at magic in general. And especially combat magic, because that was one of the biggest ways I would grow overall.

I had Basic Spatial Magic and Basic Energy Magic, and enough higher level spells that theoretically I could get the Advanced versions of either. Both categories had one spell that didn't have any natural upgrades- whether getting a single upgrade in that one remaining spell would be sufficient was another matter. I had a total of 15 and 11 upgrades for the basic versions, and that would actually be the case for energy… if all the upgrades added together fully and an even bigger if Stoneskin counted. Then again, 'stone' had worked before, so I just had to hope.

Ultimately, I wanted to improve both Fire Shield and Summon Moderate Elemental. Rather than choosing one or the other… I figured I could just do both.

"Do you think Fire Shield getting destroyed would help improve mastery?" I asked Midnight. "Or do I need to damage something with it?"

"Are either of those strictly necessary?" Midnight asked. "You just have to get better at it. To make it more fiery, I guess."

I nodded, "That doesn't really change my plans. Ignis will be a good training partner either way."

I could also call upon Shockfire, and I knew the Power Brigade had other pyros, but for double training this seemed perfectly appropriate. Furthermore, to not run cross purposes, Midnight and I would each be casting one of the spells. If I wanted Ignis to destroy my Fire Shield and also keep it in place, it was quite possible I would accidentally manipulate one side or the other. Technically I wanted to manipulate them somehow, but on purpose.

It was weird to cast a spell with no upgrades. There was no leeway on what amount of magic was natural to use. The minimum was the maximum. Though I could undercast it if I tried to make it weaker. Midnight could do that too, because it was pretty natural- though sometimes the spell would fail entirely if it was too little to form something real. Using more mana was… riskier. However things worked, magic didn't like that. But I could still do it- I just had to be conscious about it to not cause trouble.

I was happy to settle for what was natural, at least in terms of cost. I didn't want to make things better by spending extra, I wanted them to be more efficient. To improve my understanding.

I summoned Ignis first, and Midnight used Fire Shield. I asked him to dismantle the spell, and he was fairly happy to do so- pulling away chunks of flame from the shell of flame around Midnight. Ignis was quite happy in his default fiery form with no accessories besides his moustache indicating he was the Moderate version.

The results were pretty expected. Ignis took more mana and couldn't be hurt by fire, so he pretty easily eradicated a Fire Shield. So while we still had him… "Any idea how I can become better at Summon Elemental?" I asked. Ignis just shrugged. Well, that was about right. I was the manager and he was just the worker. Why would he know how summoning worked? "Do you get extra energy from eating fire? Do you want to use that energy?"

I knew he could do it- it was a pretty efficient way to put out fires- but I wasn't sure if he came out net positive.

Ignis nodded. I felt it was a yes to both.

I had the training room form a target- not one meant for accuracy, but solidity. Basically a boulder. "Melt that boulder!" I commanded. I tried to do something magic about it without spending more mana. I wasn't sure if that meant anything.

What I had in mind was a big cone of flame. Ignis knew better than that, it seemed. He walked up and placed a hand on the small boulder. Ignis was still waist high even in the Moderate form, so of course the hand was small too. Where Ignis touched, the boulder began to glow, and slowly it began to ooze out as Ignis leaned in. Eventually the little fire elemental squashed into the opening and then came out the other side.

Ignis wiped his forehead as if he'd done a hard day's work- which he had, though it had only been about a minute- and then disappeared.

I had kind of been expecting something more monumental, but on the other hand melting solid material wasn't that easy. There was a hole around six inches across through something, so I couldn't say it didn't work out at all. I wondered how well the training room could reabsorb the material… but they frequently dealt with all sorts of damage, so fire wouldn't be new.

No upgrades. Though exactly one attempt would have been too easy.

Next, I defended against Ignis as directed by Midnight. I tried to hold onto my fire shield without using any extra mana or doing something weird like making it cold. I didn't want to hurt Ignis, even if a summoned being couldn't take permanent damage. Though perhaps that was precisely the sort of manipulation necessary to get mastery. On the various websites I had read, there were frequently versions of cold Fire Shield.

Just because something wasn't naturally the way things worked in my reality didn't mean I couldn't do it. After Ignis predictably devoured my shield, I asked him a few things. "If I summoned a cold version of you, would you be able to absorb cold?"

Ignis gave me a thumbs up. I wondered if that was somehow normal in his world because it wasn't part of mine. But he was from elemental planes that weren't the ones I knew. Or one weird multi-energy plane? There had been multiple portals but that didn't mean they had to go to different dimensions or whatever.

A cold fire shield was blue fire. No, I didn't know why because usually that was pretty hot, if it involved real fire. However, when Midnight made a cold Ignis, Ignis was not blue fire. Instead, Ignis was holding a rock again. Previously Midnight had managed that because Ignis standing in snow seemed problematic. This time, it might have been the elemental's choice.

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Ignis pressed the rock against my cold fire, and frost began to form around it. Ignis continued to rotate it as it began to be covered by layers of ice. I wasn't sure if there should be this much water in the atmosphere, but it kept layering up. Maybe it wasn't real ice but magic ice, which didn't have to be made of water.

Ignis set the stone on the twice-melted boulder. It hadn't completely cooled, and it suddenly cracked. Ignis clapped before fading away.

It took a couple more rounds, swapping out energies as we kept summoning Ignis. It was hard to say how we could train that particular thing without specific resistance, but sending 'alterations' seemed like a good move. Acid and lightning shields worked pretty well. We didn't get to the point of desperation where I had to try something funky like a stone shield- would it be better or worse than Stoneskin? Probably less flexible or mobile and less capable of retribution, but maybe able to take a bigger hit. It didn't matter, though, because one after another I felt progress.

The results were fascinating. The advanced forms completely subsumed the basic mastery. I got precisely 1 natural upgrade for Energy Magic instead of all my upgrades put together, but it was quite an acceptable result. Would Chain Lightning and Blizzard suddenly be twice as good? That didn't seem likely, but anything was possible. I would have to test that… carefully.

Relatedly, they sure subsumed a large number of spells. I had expected many things, but Water Breathing and Fly ended up under Advanced Energy Magic. They certainly didn't fit under spatial magic.

For some reason, Midnight was nervous. "What's wrong, buddy? We should just be stronger." Maybe if we ran across some sort of jerk like Parrot we'd have to be quick with engaging Mental Freedom, but otherwise it was just better.

"Well…" he swished his tail slowly. "I was just thinking that the next step is… master? And that involves a few tiers of spells I can't cast. I might just be holding you back now."

I gave him a good look to really let my confusion set in. "Why? I feel like we've already been over this, but you're literally only positives." It was true that I didn't need him for some things anymore, but that didn't have anything to do with whether I wanted him around. "Also, you're barely short of being able to cast this stuff yourself. It's what, 5 levels at most? That shouldn't even take you another year. Also, you're still better than Bolster even without space lasers."

"Only because of you."

"And I only have magic because everyone in my world has a class," I shrugged. "It was frankly weirder for you to not have it."

I briefly wondered if we could break the Familiar Bond so he could have his own class stuff. That sounded awful and pointless. We'd literally both be worse off unless he somehow didn't like mage stuff- and I knew he did.

"You know what would make you feel better?" I said. "Throwing lightning at something."

"That sounds more like a you thing," Midnight said. But I heard the amusement in his voice.

"Come on, you get to be the first person to see if we can completely annihilate reality!" I stopped. "But we should go to the quarry."

"Why?"

"Chain Lightning with 12 upgrades might be almost as strong as Meteor Swarm." Actually, it could be numerically stronger. It would take 168 points to get that many upgrades normally. Now it happened to be applying to many different spells, the total point value was through the roof.

Teleport wasn't under the domain of Advanced Spatial Magic. It was the third tier. Master, probably. I really wanted to know so I could add the proper terminology to my book, but it was a pretty serious step forward. I could make some assumptions from Wrickle's work, but even she didn't directly talk about things like that much. It might be extra forbidden knowledge, and I could see why.

Anyway, the point was Teleport wasn't suddenly easier. Dimension Door would be, but that didn't go nearly far enough.

As for the results? I honestly couldn't tell. The spells were for very different things. The central impact of Meteor Swarm plus the explosions together was probably stronger. Chain Lightning was probably more accurate, and Blizzard covered a different area entirely with a different sort of effect. I was pretty sure they came out weaker than a currently unupgraded Meteor Swarm- but not by much. They sure were cheaper though, at barely more than 8 mana from a base of 13- compared to 20.

Midnight tried to cast one at full mana cost, and got interesting results. It blasted into the side of the quarry just as before, scattering rocks. It was strong, but it was at most negligibly stronger instead of more than a 50% increase. "It didn't use most of the rest of the mana?" he tilted his head.

I nodded. We might have hit that theoretical limit. I gathered magic for Blizzard and… I could feel it trying to wrestle out of my control. It didn't want to stop at the 13 mana limit, either. Midnight might have naturally balanced it, and normally when I was over 'half' mana I did so as well… but this time it simply wasn't.

It was a good thing that I had a huge area to throw whatever catastrophe happened at. I focused on remaining conscious until the spell finished forming so I could make sure that was where it went.