Chương 56: The Missing Key

Enzo stood inside the palisade, by the main gate. The wall had finally been completed, and the reinforced gate stood flanked by two guard towers, each with a guard posted at the top. Pops waited beside his bike, a pack on his back, a hunting knife at his belt, and a bow and quiver slung over his shoulders. He looked like he'd been ready to go an hour ago. Knowing him, he'd probably been ready last night. Signe stood beside her own bike with her own backpack and a small knife at her hip.

"Don't worry if we're not back tonight," Pops said, adjusting a strap.

"I want to scout the area first. See if any of my old friends are around before we approach the 101s directly." Enzo nodded.

"Take care, Dad." Pops studied him for a moment. Then he clasped Enzo's shoulder, held it for a moment, and let go. He glanced at Signe, then mounted his bike and started down the road at an easy pace, not looking back. Signe approached Enzo. They shared a quiet moment. He took her hand.

"Be careful, okay?" She smiled and squeezed his fingers.

"I will." He didn't let go. Neither did she. Then Signe stepped closer, hesitated for half a second, and kissed him. Enzo's hand found her cheek, and he kissed her back. The last time had been before university. A goodbye neither of them had named, with promises to visit. Then Gramps had died. Then the accident had taken his knee, and too many other things with it. Signe pulled back a few heartbeats later. She held his gaze a moment.

"It shouldn't have taken an apocalypse for us to do that again." Enzo laughed.

"It was a little more complicated than that." She smiled, then turned with a flick of her hair, and mounted the bike.

"Don't burn the settlement down while I'm gone."

"No promises." Enzo watched her go, pedaling hard to catch up to Pops. He stayed until they rounded the bend, and the Watch pushed the gates closed, before sliding a thick, heavy beam in place. Then he turned back toward the settlement, leaned on his cane, and started walking. His thoughts wanted to remain fixed on Signe and the dangers beyond their small settlement, but he knew that was a bad idea. He couldn't control what was out there. Not yet, at least. And Pops was with her.

The old man would take care of them both. Instead, he pulled up his status and located his next project. Lock was level 10. It was time to upgrade the spell, and he had the perfect idea for which direction to take it.

Enzo sat at the workbench, spellbook open, sketching. The page in front of him was a mess of overlapping circles and other geometric additions with annotations. Lock's original creation hadn't involved a spell form. It had been free-form mana threading and hardening. It had taught him the basis of what arcane mana was. Force. Though it was also Resistance, which was probably just because any counter-force would be considered a resistance. Or maybe he was wrong, and it actually was both.

It was just one question in a long list that the Guide could have been more useful in answering. Or whoever made it could have sent them a mentor or two. Either would have been satisfactory. From Lock, Telekinesis had come. He'd taken the concept of using force to physically alter the position of something, but wrapped it in a spell form. It was almost paradoxical, but by constraining the mana, he'd been able to do more with it. Because spell forms could carry concepts.

Intention that guided the individual mana thread's behavior. And while Lock lacked a spell form, he couldn't see a way to expand its function. So what he wanted to do was work backward. Take what he'd learned from Telekinesis, and redesign Lock using a spell form. But that alone wasn't enough. The question was what to do with Lock beyond simply locking and unlocking. He also wanted to retain the arcane reinforcement it applied to any locked mechanism.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. The redesign was straightforward. He was confident the basic form in front of him would work. It would replicate Lock as it already functioned. But he hadn't cast it yet, because he wanted more. He wanted to take the concept of locking and build on it to allow him to lock things in place. It would probably only work on physical objects, because it would be an inversion of what Telekinesis did.

Instead of moving an object freely, the idea was to seize it and hold it in place until the mana ran out. The question was whether the Guide would let him. This wasn't a simple improvement on what the spell already did. It wasn't about adding more force or energy. This would expand its conceptual scope, while retaining existing functionality. And the link between the two concepts was paper thin. Lock. One word.

And a dash of his hopes and dreams that the magic behind the Guide might be flexible enough to allow such wordplay. But that was the point. The Guide was both the most useful tool they had, and the most obnoxious. They needed it to survive, but they needed to understand what it could and couldn't do. And that required testing. He had several ideas on how to combine the telekinetic aspect. The problem was that he had no idea how to include the existing reinforcement of the lock spell.

Lock currently left behind a layer of arcane mana to secure the locking mechanism so that only the proper key or enough force would break through the magic, allowing it to be unlocked. It was a minor function of Lock. And giving it up was the easiest way forward. But the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to keep it. If he could not only lock things in place, but coat them with protective mana, then before anyone could pick it up, they would first have to break through his spell.

The problem was that he understood mana better now. Arcane was brittle. The entire spell would shatter with enough force, destroying not just the protective barrier, but the magic holding the object in place at the same time. He tapped the pen against the page. Metal was the obvious answer. Dense, resilient, and capable of absorbing force. A thin layer of metal mana woven into the Lock spell would give the reinforcement the flexibility that arcane lacked.

While Kenzo was right that arcane mana was less efficient than the other mana types, metal mana was far more rigid than arcane. And the spell required an element of formlessness which metal lacked. To achieve what he wanted, the spell form needed the ability to snap between formless and fixed. Arcane could do that easily enough, as Telekinesis proved, but to accomplish it with metal mana required more threads. Which meant considerably more mana. And it was still entirely theoretical.

He couldn't risk casting the experimental version of the new Lock, because the Guide would interpret it as an upgraded version. Probably. He didn't want it to recognize the new spell form as Lock, and the later version, assuming he could design it, as a separate spell to lock objects in place. Enzo set the spellbook aside and held up his right hand. A different experiment was required. He started with Shield. The first arcane thread drawn from his forehead spun into a circle easily enough.

He had reached the point where he could almost conjure a shield manually just as fast as he could speak the Simplified Invocation. But he held the thread in place, and added a second layer. A band of metal mana wrapped closely around the outer edge of the first thread. Two more metal mana threads followed, both of them straight, overlapping to form a cross. He released the form. The shield that materialized was different. The arcane barrier still shimmered in its usual purple from behind, where he was looking.

But the edges caught the light with a faint metallic gleam. He continued feeding mana into the shield, and stepped around to look at the front. A layer of metal covered and shielded the arcane barrier. He rapped his knuckles on it. Even without testing it, he knew it would take considerably more force to break this version of the spell. But he could also feel the difference in the mana cost. It was pulling both arcane and metal, and the draw was considerable despite keeping the metal layer as thin as possible.

He dismissed the spell. New notifications pulsed. — Tier 0 Eater Eliminated (x1) → Bonus Mana Capacity Provided (+5) Analyze (Level 7) → Analyze (Level 8) Conjure: Weapon (Level 4) → Conjure: Weapon (Level 5) Shield (Level 6) → Shield (Level 7) — Spell Updated: Shield (Level 7) Type: Arcane, Metal Modifiers: Metal- Description: Creates a barrier of condensed mana that blocks physical and magical attacks.

— Notification The Universal Training Guide has detected multiple spells with shared structural, conceptual, and functional overlap. Spells detected: Shield (Level 7), Conjure: Weapon (Level 5) Common Classification: Armament Manifestation Merge detected spells? — Enzo declined. He'd had a feeling the Guide might propose the merger, but he wanted to retain Shield as a separate spell, so that he could develop it more freely even if there might be a way to separate or even recreate them later.

After all, the Guide wasn't really giving them any direct benefits to spells and techniques except Simplified Invocation. Something he still wasn't completely comfortable with. But he was no longer as suspicious as he had been. The Guide felt like a set of training wheels. But where skill levels had the benefit of adaptations once they'd leveled up enough, spells and techniques reaching higher levels had provided no tangible benefit.

The Guide required them to improve the ability at least once before it would increase the level and continue tracking the progress, but they could modify spells and techniques freely. Whenever they wanted, at any level, and as many times as they wanted. Which meant the levels had to be tracking something else. And so far they'd been unable to identify the purpose. None of which helped him. His progress was stuck. He was confident that the new spell form would work. It would target and physically manipulate locks.

Less confident about the ideas for incorporating telekinesis to lock objects in place. And he had no idea how to approach the additional reinforcement. Enzo sighed. He missed phones. And the internet. He wanted to jump online and argue with other mages all over the planet about magic. Learn what they knew. Share what he knew. Read people's dumb conspiracy theories about the Guide. Look at videos of people fighting Eaters and Beasts. See what had happened to other people's pets.

He grabbed his spellbook and his cane and headed for the door. It was time to bug Sumi for ideas.