Reborn With a Magic System

With night falling on the second day of the excursion, Damion was preparing to settle in for the evening. Despite what Inara thought, his camp was not that close to where she and Ronald discovered the Breach. The reason the pair had encountered him and Phil was because both he and the Snow Hawk could fly, allowing them to cover a greater distance.

While the distance was still further than Inara believed, she and Ronald were still the closest students to Damion's camp. The next closest group just so happened to be the trio of Thomas, Geoffrey and Yuri, who were unwittingly moving closer to Damion's camp in their search of lackeys.

Due to Damion casting Frost Over several times a day, the area around his camp had become quite the winter wonderland. The iced ground and chilling temperatures were fine for him and Phil, but anyone else coming into the area would think they had suddenly walked into an open world freezer.

The repeated casting keeping the effects of Frost Over active allowed Damion to do a bit of experimenting with the spell. As with any spell, the more he used it the more he understood it, and he was coming to understand Frost Over affected more than just the terrain and the temperature. Since he had basically created a near permanently frosted over area, he discovered that the spell would not only hinder anything coming into the area, but also enhanced his other Ice spells. Any Ice spell he cast required less mana to activate and felt more powerful than usual.

A useful boost, however, considering Damion had to cast Frost Over four times before he would start seeing the effects, the boost had limited actual value. The mana cost of the spell was high, even by tier 3 standards. At 200 mana per cast, Damion was burning through a quarter of his mana to create the frosted area that could save him ten percent of the cost of his later spells. Even when factoring in the boost to the power of his Ice spells, the limited 20-meter range of Frost Over effectively nullified his advantage, since any intelligent opponent would simply retreat. In such a situation, Damion would have wasted all that mana. Even with his high regeneration, it was a risky strategy to use.

There was one thing that brought him hope, spells became stronger as they were mastered. Most of his spells increased their range, either how far an Ice Shard could travel or increased their power, like Summon Ice and Ice Wall, both of which increased the amount of the ice created. However, some spells, like Spatial Storage, decreased in the mana cost.

Damion's hope for Frost Over was that it would either increase the range of the effect, boost the 20-meter radius up, or significantly decrease the cost of casting. Though, he hoped more for the former, since mana consumption would become less troublesome as he got stronger.

In the safety of his tent, Damion continued to study the enchantments he recorded from the testing crystals. The enchantments on the greenish crystal, that tested magic talent, and the enchantments on the blood red crystal, that tested magic power and capacity, he fully understood. He had not figured out how to adapt the enchantments of the crystals to his artifact yet, but he felt he was close.

The problem Damion was having was with the clear crystal. The enchantment should have been nearly identical to the green, since it tested affinity instead of talent. But there was an additional segment of the enchantment that did something else, and Damion just was not sure what it did. The glyphs making up this section were unfamiliar to him, leaving him two options to figure it out. Make something with those glyphs and see what happens, or slowly take them apart piece by piece to find their core meaning.

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For now, since he was under the watchful eye of a recon drone, Damion decided to begin dissecting the unfamiliar glyphs. Every glyph was made up of multiple segments and the arrangement and orientation of each part affected the meaning of the glyph and thus its use. A series of glyphs put together on an artifact, would then make an enchantment, but only if the sequence of glyphs functioned together.

Just lining up random glyphs would not make an enchantment. Doing so and then trying to channel mana through it to activate the enchantment would either result in nothing happening, receiving a backlash from the artifact, or in horribly constructed artifacts, result in the destruction of the artifact.

In the case of the testing crystals, and their fake glyphs mixed into the enchantments, after an enchantment was laid down it became set. It was not possible to change the enchantment. This meant that the gibberish glyphs did nothing but confuse anyone trying to decipher the workings of the artifact they were on.

Even though Damion understood the theories, and had a vast knowledge of the Nashto language, he was having trouble with the clear crystal's final enchantment. After trying to break the glyphs down all night, the only thing he could come up with that the glyph locked something, or locked something in. What that meant or what it was doing in a crystal meant to test a person's affinity, Damion had no idea.

It was not until the sun was coming up in the morning that Damion realized he had worked all night. He was about to lay down and get a little bit of sleep, when he heard someone calling from outside his tent.

"Hello in there. We have a proposition for you."

The voice sounded familiar to Damion and as much as he wanted to take a nap, he decided to step outside his tent to see what the person wanted.

When Damion stuck his head out of the tent and looked around to see who was disturbing him so early in the morning, he wanted to laugh. It was Thomas Sorin and his two cronies.

"Good morning," Damion said with a smile. If he did not know about the drones keeping an eye on the students, which Damion could spot hovering above the tree lines in the distance, he might have attacked the trio immediately, but for now he held back.

"Mage Wells," Thomas swallowed hard when he saw Damion coming out of the tent.

If they had known this was Damion's campsite, they would have bypassed it. They had come across the campsite near sunset last night and not spotted anyone around the camp. The chilling air and the frozen ground should have been a clue to them, but they thought it was just an aftereffect of whatever beast had lived here before the student in the tent claimed it.

They took turns watching the nearby tent all night, but never saw anyone come out and when morning came and still no one emerged, the trio thought they might have found a campsite from a student that had been eliminated. As far as they could tell, the chilling aura around the campsite was driving away the local Ferocious Beasts, so they thought if the site was abandoned, they would take it over. And even it if it was not abandoned, they felt they could probably still take it over.

"Oh, hello, Mage Sorin," Damion smiled, giving the trio an unsettling feeling in their stomachs. "What brings the three of you to my little camp?"

"We were looking for allies. Since I'm sure you have no interest in joining forces with us we'll be going."

Thomas turned to leave with Yuri and Geoffrey, but someone bursting out of the brush in front of them stopped them.

The student that appeared was Ronald Anderson, who looked quite happy to find the group of people in front of him. The smile on his face was in stark contrast to how he looked. Dirty clothes covered in mud, as well as a fair bit of dirt and mud on his clothing. The Wood mage maintained his smile after looking around and then shouting at the top of his lungs.

"I found him!"

A moment later a call answered him.

"Coming!"

The two shouts woke Phil, who was perched in a nearby tree, and he let out his own loud cry in response. To everyone else it sounded like a cry of alarm, but through their bond, Damion got a different message.

'Sleep!'

'Don't worry,' Damion sent back to the Snow Hawk. 'Maybe they found a strong beast to fight.'