Save Scumming Chapter One Hundred and Seventy-Nine - Hate Magic

Chapter One Hundred and Seventy-Nine - Hate Magic

I had to Reload eventually. One part because I was stretching things out too much, and another because I was growing a little too strong.

The Professor explained it pretty simply: repetition made one stronger. Since I was repeatedly trying to master a few new magical techniques, my core was adapting to it and growing used to the action.

That wasn't sothing I could afford to do.

When I Reloaded, one of the first things I did was cast Shadow Bolt against the far wall of my apartnt, trying as I did to modify the spell to make it twist, and I failed entirely.

Grunting in frustration, I spent the next hour or so trying over and over again, and it was only at the end that I managed to make the spell swerve a little bit.

The issue was twofold. The first part was basically that while I had ntal practice, casting spells and modifying them needed a bit of muscle mory, and that didn't carry back with . The second was that I was stupid as shit.

If I was smart, like properly smart, then maybe I'd be able to master this kind of spellwork in a few days. As it was, I was barely ahead of average as far as Professor Sawyer was concerned. I had ti on my hand, which helped a lot, but that was all.

Could a person of average or below average intelligence learn to play a complex instrunt? Yeah, of course. It would just take more ti and effort than soone actually smart.

Sighing, I left my apartnt and placed a few calls. I wasn't returning to Fran's place.

The sex was nice. Like hella nice. But I was feeling a certain way about Fran and I needed a bit of distance, most of all because I was very conflicted over getting close to soone and then that version of them never existing in the first place.

So instead I packed up a few things, including Mister Couchtop, called up an auto-taxi and reserved a room in a four-star hotel just a couple of blocks over from the Institute for the Magical Arts.

A text to Fran that she'd get to eventually would open up so doors for . It was a smaller ask for her to help get in touch with Professor Sawyer again for training than it was for her to do that and also let stay at her place.

The next day, that's what happened. I t Fran at the school's front entrance, shook hands, gave her an awkward hug, then we t with the sa two professors.

Sawyer's first lesson was a repeat of last ti's, the only difference being that I now understood one word in five instead of just one word in ten. I showed him what I could do, and we got to work again.

He was an alright teacher, even if it was very clear that the only thing keeping his attention on what was happening was the promise of fat stacks of cash.

Three days later, I had finally figured out a few more tricks. Or maybe it would be more appropriate to say that I was learning things step by painful step.

Of the two thods that Sawyer knew that I could use, we ended up settling on the simpler of the two. Pre-cast spell modification.

That ant that I had to learn sothing like three-dozen spell parts to learn to craft in a blink and set into the right spots.

It was rather modular, and since I was mostly using the forms on a spell that I already knew the shape of, it wasn't that complex, but unless I wanted to only have one trick up my sleeve, I needed to learn multiple modifiers.

We focused on three of them at first. In order of pain-to-the-rearness they were:

Spell expression delay

Spell movent modifier

Spell shape modifier

The first was basically a sort of looping, three-dinsional spiral. I had to take raw magic, extrude it from my core, and shape it into the spiral and then connect it to the right sections of Shadow Bolt monts before casting it.

It felt like grabbing a long piece of string and twirling it in the air so that it was in just the right shape, only I was doing that while juggling with both hands already.

Still, of the three, it was the easiest, and it was the spell modifier that had the most use. It essentially just slowed down the progress of magical energy into an already-carved spell.

The spell movent modifier was, by far, the hardest to do. It was, in so ways, similar to the spell expression delay spell-add-on. It tacked onto the end of Shadow Bolt and changed the direction the spell moved in, and the way it moved through the air once it was in flight.

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The problem was that the way the spell worked was by creating a sort of little ball that had the spell flight information within it. The spell would 'pick up' that bundle on the way out, and it would dictate the direction of flight.

On one cast of Shadow Bolt, I managed to spin the spell around to smack myself in the face with it.

The small orb had to be precise and since it had to be created and slapped onto Shadow Bolt at the mont of creation. So really, it had to be precise and fast.

That was down to practice.

For so reason, it reminded a lot of one of those gimmicky little drawing things? Like how to draw a cat with only six lines. The kind of doodle you'd learn to do once in middle school and then would carve into desks and idly draw in notebooks for the rest of your life.

The spell shape modifier, by contrast, was easy. Just a little twist of magic on the end. There were a few dozen 'shapes' to that twist that gave different results. So turned the end of Shadow Bolt into a sort of long needle, others into a more flattened, bullet shape. There were uses for all of them.

The more complicated shapes had the ability to better penetrate shields, or turn the end of the spell into a fork to punch twice as many holes per spell into soone, but that wasn't super hard to learn.

So, all in all, I had to not only practice casting Shadow Bolt over and over again, taking dangerous amounts of drugs to keep up the practice, but I also had to practice adding modules to the spell.

By the end of that second week, I had... so of that mastered.

I could delay Shadow Bolt for nearly half a minute, keeping the spell cast but not yet flying while I added the ability to fly along a pre-determined route and reshaped the spell to be more than just a blob of dark magical stuff.

The result was a spell that I could direct around small obstacles and which hit a little harder than it used to.

"It's not going to be enough," I said.

I was five days into a week of non-stop practice. It was nine-to-seven work, with breaks to eat and little else. My brain was leaking out of my ears, and I was genuinely only keeping up with it because of spite and because of montum.

"Hmm. What's the issue?" Sawyer asked. "You need more practice to speed the casting, and you pay more attention to what I was saying if you want the directionality of the spell to be good."

"Yeah, sure," I said. The little incrents of progress were helping a lot. "But it's not punching hard enough. Even with the end being sharpened."

"Oh. Yeah, I can see that. There are limits to what a first level spell can do. That, and your resonance is awful."

"My what?" I asked as I turned away from the practice range. It was a long room, with concrete walls, fold-out obstacles, and sound baffling on the walls. The only differences from a gun range were all of the magical sensors and so of the tools available at the back.

Sawyer blinked and then looked at . "You do know that all magics are empowered by emotion, right?"

"Yeah," I said.

"And Darkness is empowered by..."

"Uh, I don't know. Boredom or sothing?"

He shrugged. "Sure, that's part of it. The magic runs the gamut from boredom to loathing. Hate. It's hate magic. There are so people that dislike Dark magic because of the implications of that, but those people are idiots. Might as well hate Fire magic for the anger it causes, or Ice for the terror that it feeds on. Anyway, the way you feel empowers your spellwork. It's a factual, repeatable, and confirmable phenona."

"So, what, I need to be pissed off to cast harder?"

"It'd help, but loathing isn't just anger," he said. Then he frowned. "Do you have a therapist?"

"No. I mostly pretend that I don't have problems until they co around and bite in the ass," I said.

He snorted. "I suppose self-loathing might work, then, but I think it's healthier if you externalize it. Try working in academia. It's given enough loathing to blast holes through walls."

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