D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

— Kat —

While Hunter and Kamiko were off talking with Stphn about finding a volunteer or two for helping navigate the forests, Kat and Lily had set off on a bit of a date. It wasn’t going to be a proper date, everyone in town was a bit too high strung for that… and even if they weren’t now wasn’t really the time to relax. Kat and Lily probably couldn’t even if they wanted to.

Instead, they were going to do a lap of the small village, see what sights there were, and then find an out of the way place to do some magic practice. For now, the village was an odd mix of ‘busy’ and ‘quiet’. The streets were nearly empty, with the only people you did see clearly in a rush, usually heading for the mayor’s place.

The other people weren’t much better. There were housewives and house husbands loading up bundles of laundry while others brought out an iron to help finish the cleaning off. It was an actual iron too, simply made of a big chunk of metal. It was being heated by an older woman with fire magic and then used to straighten and dry the clothes out if the sizzling was anything to go buy.

There were a few food stalls, but they were just as busy. One of stall was constantly watching a big pot that ate up and endless stream of ingredients that were regularly poured out into bowls and stacked together. Another stall was making some rather rough looking sandwiches, no knives were being used and it looked to be a flatbread, but it looked easy enough to eat for those who didn’t want soup.

A few guards came by with a giant metal tray each. They loaded up the food, stacking it high and heading off to the walls to keep the guards fed and alert. It made the ‘walking around’ part of the notdate a bit awkward. While normally you’d see stalls selling their wares, or just people casually going about their day, here there was a constant sense of unease.

Even with the nets that looked to be recently repaired people kept wary eyes up on the sky.

After one loop around, Kat and Lily decided it was best to take up a spot right next to the wall. It wasn’t hidden from the guards patrolling said wall, but nothing they were doing was a true secret. Lily hopped down from Kat’s shoulder and transformed before checking out her notes.

“So what are you practicing here?” asked Kat.

“Well I did promise to try and get that spell to merge with shadows working,” said Lily.

“Is that going to be hard?” asked Kat.

“Yes, very,” said Lily as she shuffled through the papers in her hands.

“Well… want to explain it to me? That might help?” offered Kat.

Lily chewed her lip, wincing as she bit right through the section of skin with her sharp teeth. “Um… yeah I suppose I can… but it’s really difficult to understand if you’re not thinking about it the right way…”

“Didn’t Nixilei explain it before though? Just put the right runes in your sigil and the spell goes? I imagine it’s hard to learn the runes, but once you’ve got that down how much is left?” asked Kat.

“Ah… yeah I mean… that’s not wrong… but it’s so very simplified it’s not funny. That’s like… like… like saying you can program a video game with a few lines of code that tell the computer what to do. It’s… a bit like programming? But also sort of like poetry? Err… hmm… ok how do I dumb this down but not… quite that far,” mumbled Lily.

“Ok… I think I’ve got a good explanation. Let’s say you’ve got three runes. The first is Fire… but it’s also heat, energy, and potential. The second rune is forward, momentum, and shift, while the third is strike, punch, force. Now what a lot of people don’t understand is that putting runes together, and the order you do that in, effects the ‘sentence’ you’re spelling out.

“So… let’s say you put them in that order. Fire rune, Forward rune, and Strike rune. You might think that’s a firebolt spell. Makes sense right? You summon the fire, you send it forward, and it does damage when it hits things right? Well… it could instead make it so that your fists are enhanced so that the next time you punch someone it does more damage.

How? Well the spell might say ‘Fire, forward, strike’ but it also says, ‘potential, momentum, and punch’ so you get the spell ‘Momentous Punch’ or maybe ‘Momentous Fire Punch’ instead.

“And it’s really hard to say what the spell will do without casting it. Now you can build up an intuition for things, and if you’ve got enough power and control, then you can sort of force the spell to do what you want, but the easiest way is practice. If you force a spell that’s ‘correct enough’ to do what you actually want, you can just repeat the cast over and over until it just works.

“It’s still not as mana efficient as if you’d worked out a better… ‘sentence’ I suppose you could call it. If you can find the optimal sentence then you’ll do more damage for less mana, or whatever the effect you’re looking for us. Magic seems to allow for more efficient and varied effects the more you understand the runes…

“But that’s hard. You can’t just read the runes and what it means… because that’s never quite all the meanings. My paper book talked about it, but the mage who wrote it guessed that the runes relate to specific phenomena, but the way that phenomena is filtered through our brain and soul… garble the output a bit.

Perhaps the runes have ‘true’ meanings, or perhaps we need to find the rune with the meaning that’s ‘true’ for us. It can get a bit philosophical.

“Which isn’t to say you can’t share spells, you totally can. Especially if you cast the spell around the person you’re teaching. It just works better though the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of that is something that isn’t covered in my books. I can take a few guesses, but that’s fine. Find adventures at

“Now, the issue here? The spell I want isn’t in any of my books so I can’t just crib those notes. Worse, I don’t have a proper understanding of the difference between Shadow and Darkness runes, though I have been making progress on that front, it’s been my main source of study. Though… then comes the other problem.

“See, the reason why ‘easy’ or ‘simple’ spells are basically just handed out, or at least not guarded so jealously? It’s easy to test those, easy to try a whole bunch… all without inuring yourself too much.

“But more complicated things? Like turning myself into shadows? That’s a much more intricate thing. Because I need to meld my body into the shadows, and then return my body back to how it was when the spell ends. Theoretically, if I had enough power and messed up the spell badly enough I could be converting my cells into darkness destroying my body in the process,”

“This… suddenly seems like a much scarier prospect,” said Kat slowly.

“Yeah…” said Lily with a grimace. “It can be made easy by taking bits and pieces of other spells that work… but that can be pretty risky too. Of course, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Using the example above, if I was actually starting to destroy part of my body the pain would likely cause me to drop the spell, and even if I didn’t accidentally drop it, I can intentionally drop it.

“Though that would cause some magical backlash, but that’s also not going to cause any permanent damage if I’m careful. Just have to rest between spell failures. Not sure how long, my notes aren’t clear on that, but I’m sure my body will tell me. I mean, if I’m still in pain casting more spells is obviously not the plan,”

“You know… I think I’m starting to understand how you felt when I was trying to come up with my water limbs trick for the science fair,” grumbled Kat.

Lily let out a long sigh. “I don’t know that I really want you to understand that feeling… because it also means I now understand WHY you would keep working on something like that… except this is WORSE because I’m not even sure I can make this spell at Rank 2.

I could try and develop it specifically for Rank 3… but that’s an order of magnitude harder and I don’t have any experience with those spells yet. I’m not even sure how close I am to Rank 3… but I know my progress has been really quick. At least, compared to a more normal mage,”

“I mean, just at a guess I imagine your Rank ups are tied to my own Rank. Just a guess,” suggested Kat.

“No, it’s a good one. You’re probably right that it plays a large role… I just… I don’t know. I guess I don’t know if this is really the best way. I think it has to be, at least for surviving this drake… but I don’t know if I can manage it before we run into it,” said Lily.

“All you can do is try,” returned Kat.