Chương 30: Even Gloria Can Learn

[Domus Temporaria] Gloria said as the completed formation sank into the wall, its lines disappearing beneath the surface while a new destination established itself within her awareness. Having this many places available for an immediate return felt wonderfully convenient, and adding a moving destination pleased her even more than the fixed locations she had already prepared. During DDO, the entire voyage had existed as little more than a lengthy cutscene, yet the vessel had become a genuine place now.

"Perfect," Gloria murmured as she stepped away from the wall and continued down the hallway. The corridor remained surprisingly empty for a vessel carrying so many passengers, though the muffled footsteps and excited voices overhead explained where everyone had gone, for the departure performance would begin within minutes and most of the Katamaran's occupants had already crowded onto the viewing galleries.

Gloria welcomed their absence, since her excuse for leaving Iris under Echidna's supervision had concerned private duties, and being discovered repeatedly attempting the most basic form of magic practiced by everyone born in this age would have invited questions that she had no desire to answer.

A pair of tall glass doors waited near the end of the passage, opening onto a narrow balcony built along the vessel's side, and after checking both directions to ensure that no curious passenger had remained behind, Gloria slipped through them and closed the entrance at her back. Iris's performance had surprised her considerably, because drawing circles of comparable quality had required Gloria years of practice.

The Archer's first efforts already possessed the steadiness and proportion necessary for functional spellcraft, and although Gloria intended to remove every minute imperfection before allowing her student to become satisfied, Iris had advanced through the earliest stage far more quickly than anticipated. But for now, Iris could wait, because Gloria had left the cabin to test something considerably more personal.

She stepped away from the railing, extended one hand toward the open sky and stared into her palm as she recalled everything Iris had explained about imagination-based magic. The desired effect came first, followed by the process that would produce it, so Gloria pictured mana gathering beneath her scales, taking on the nature of lightning and compressing into a narrow discharge before passing through her palm.

She imagined the brilliance of the bolt, the sharp report accompanying its release and the path it would take through the air, then tightened her fist, opened it once more and commanded the completed vision to become real.

"Funke!" Nothing emerged from her hand, and the evening breeze continued passing through her fingers with complete indifference.

"That was profoundly disappointing." She repeated the exercise with greater concentration, reconstructing each stage with enough detail to picture the flow of mana entering the spell and the exact shape the lightning should possess upon release, yet a second utterance of "Funke" produced no better result than the first.

'I know what lightning looks like, I understand what the spell is meant to do, and I have spent more of my life imagining magic than Iris has, so this cannot simply be a matter of creativity,' Gloria thought, tapping her claw against the railing while she considered the failure.

'Either imagination casting is a skill developed through training and repeated use, or this world grants it only to those created beneath its laws.' The second possibility offended her immediately, for a restriction based upon where someone had come into existence offered nothing to study, overcome or improve, and Gloria refused to accept such a boring explanation while any alternative remained available.

A flawless white circle flowed from her claw, and before its light had fully brightened, Gloria drew another beside it, followed by ten more arranged in orderly rows. She inserted the familiar lightning mark into each formation with identical movements, completing them one after another until twelve copies of [Funke] released. The bolts crossed the same distance before dissolving, their branches separating at nearly identical points while their light faded so evenly that the final sparks vanished together.

'Even if I cannot cast an entire spell through imagination yet, I might not need to begin with this crude process,' Gloria realized as she raised her claw once more.

'I already know how to construct the formation, so perhaps imagination only needs to perform one part of the work.' She drew the upper half of a circle and stopped, leaving the unfinished line suspended before her. Normally she would have completed the remaining half with another sweep of her claw, though she lowered her hand instead and fixed the missing curve inside her mind, holding its center, radius and intended path as clearly as she could.

"Continue," Gloria commanded. For several seconds, the half-circle did nothing, and she felt the incomplete formation beginning to weaken as its mana leaked into the surrounding air. Gloria extended her palm toward it, concentrating upon the empty space separating one end from the other while imagining the line flowing onward without any physical guidance, and when the circle continued resisting her, she forced greater focus into the thought.

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'The path is already decided, so follow it. Maintain the radius, return to the beginning and close.' A thin white strand twitched at the end of the formation. Gloria's eyes widened, though she held herself perfectly still as the strand began crawling through the air without any movement from her claw. Its course wavered immediately, bending too far outward before curving back toward the intended path, yet it continued growing under the direction of her thoughts and struggled around the missing half of the circle.

"Yes," Gloria whispered, scarcely breathing as it approached the opposite end.

"Continue exactly as you are. Close the formation." The advancing line lurched inward during its final stretch and passed beneath the point it needed to meet, leaving a narrow gap between both ends before the malformed circle shuddered and collapsed into scattered motes of white light. Gloria stared at the empty space where it had vanished, her hand remaining extended while the failure replayed itself within her thoughts.

'I never moved my fingers...' A wild grin spread across Gloria's face as the meaning of that thought struck her, and her wings snapped open behind her while she threw both hands into the air.

"HAHA-haHA! I DID IT!" Her voice carried far more loudly across the balcony than intended, causing Gloria to freeze with her arms still raised as the echo returned to her. She glanced toward the glass doors, slowly lowered her hands and folded her wings before coughing into one fist with as much dignity as she could recover. The formation had been atrocious, yet her imagination had visibly altered a magical circle, proving that the two systems could communicate.

Gloria stared at the empty air for another moment as her excitement settled into concentration.

'But that leaves another question...' Her failure had resulted partly from surprise, because watching a line respond to thought alone had shattered her concentration at the worst possible moment, though the method itself had also forced her into an unfamiliar rhythm. Gloria could draw a complete circle in less than a second when using her hands, with simpler formations often requiring little more than half that time, whereas guiding the imagined line along the missing curve had taken two or three agonizing seconds.

"Perhaps the mistake lies in attempting to draw it at all," Gloria murmured, lifting her hand toward the sky once more.

"If imagination can produce the line, then there should be no reason to construct each section separately when I already know precisely how the completed formation should appear." The gesture probably contributed nothing to the magic, yet imagination governed this system strongly enough that extending her palm helped her thoughts establish a clear direction.

She began searching for the simplest formation within her memory, rejecting several possibilities before settling upon the spell that had introduced generations of players to the joy of setting distant objects on fire.

'You cannot get much simpler than a fireball.' Gloria fixed the completed formation within her mind, picturing its center and circumference as a single object, then imagined the familiar flame sigil sweeping horizontally across its interior. The entire circle appeared before her palm in less time than her eyes required to follow its creation, with the white circle flashing into existence almost simultaneously with the fiery mark at its center.

Delight surged through her at the sight, though it lasted only until she remembered the relationship between construction speed and magical intensity.

'Oh... that may be a problem.' [Fireball] A sphere of fire large enough to engulf a grown man burst from the circle and shot upward so quickly that Gloria scarcely saw it move, reaching twice the height of the ship in less than an instant. Only afterward did a sharp crack reach the balcony, rattling the glass doors and throwing her hair backward.

The Fireball detonated high above the ship with enough force to turn the harbour bright as midday, swelling into a burning sphere before tearing itself apart into thousands of embers that scattered through the returning darkness. For a few seconds she remained perfectly still, then a grin spread across her face and she burst into delighted laughter.

'If a formation that simple gained so much from being completed instantly, what will happen when I use this with something far grander? Had I aimed that Fireball downward, I cannot imagine the harbour surviving as anything more than ash.' The pounding of boots beyond the glass doors interrupted her before she could take the idea any further.

"Was that the signal?" a sailor shouted from the corridor.

"It came from above us, so what else could it have been?"

"We still have three minutes!"

"Then we have no minutes! Light the first rack and move!" Several sailors rushed past the doors, one struggling to fasten his coat while another carried an armful of launching rods toward the upper decks. Gloria's smile faded as she watched them disappear around the curve of the passage, leaving her to glance between the corridor and the final embers overhead.

'Signal?' A sharp whistle rose from somewhere beneath the balcony, and Gloria leaned over the railing as a firework wider than a siege bolt raced upward, trailing golden sparks toward the darkening sky. The rocket climbed until its whistle broke beneath a tremendous burst, and the golden trail opened into a vast dragon formed from purple fire.

Its horned head turned as though searching the harbour, claws stretched from its blazing limbs and enormous wings unfurled behind it, each membrane woven from thousands of sparks that continued burning instead of falling away. Eight answering whistles rose from Ural before the dragon had fully spread its wings, and rockets launched from separate points across the city before bursting into eight humanoid figures, each shaped from a different color of flame.

They hung above the rooftops with weapons raised as the dragon swept around the Katamaran, circling the entire vessel, then turned toward the city and surged forward. The eight figures moved to meet her, streaking through the air as they struck with blades, arrows and flashes of colored light, while the dragon twisted among them and drove several back with broad sweeps of her fiery wings.

Their brief struggle carried them high above the harbour until a pale-blue light appeared overhead, unfolding into the shape of a warrior holding an enormous sword. The swordsman dropped through the center of the battle and drove the blade into the dragon's head, freezing every figure in place for a single breath before the dragon, the eight defenders and the warrior exploded together.

Purple, blue, crimson and gold flooded the sky, followed by hundreds of smaller fireworks launching from both the Katamaran and Ural until the darkness vanished beneath layer after layer of color.