Emily closes her eyes and pulls up her notes c Gaius’ findings on assions, supported by his tless observations of es. She opens a bnk note as well and writes down her major attribute ges to pare them to Gaius’ observations, assessing the differen her own experience from the norm.

  Awakening:

  Strength 7, Dexterity 15, Agility 12, Vitality 8, Intelligence 22

  Pre-first assion:

  Strength 8, Dexterity 19, Agility 16, Vitality 8, Intelligence 34

  Post-first assion:

  Strength 12, Dexterity 32, Agility 25, Vitality 13, Intelligence 54

  Pre-sed assion:

  Strength 15, Dexterity 40, Agility 31, Vitality 14, Intelligence 75

  Post-sed assion:

  Strength 20, Dexterity 64, Agility 50, Vitality 17, Intelligence 118

  Current:

  Strength 20, Dexterity 64, Agility 50, Vitality 17, Intelligence 120

  My agility aerity increasing so much more than my strength and vitality is due purely to my maa, not mana. So, if I equalise them to match the increase of my strength and vitality, it should follow the pattern of a normal mage.

  She edits her notes, refining them as she goes and splitting out the stats into their pos influenced by mana and maa separately.

  My intelligence growth is still abnormal pared to the rest of my stats, so part of that must be maa too. I need a baselio reference if I want to try and work out how much.

  Emily opens her eyes, turnitention to her friends with barely a sed having passed.

  “Jules, how big is yical perceptie?” she asks.

  “About six metres,” Juliana answers instantly, tilting her head in fusion as she does.

  “Thanks. What about you Tom?”

  “Um. I think two metres?” he responds hesitantly.

  “Check please,” Emily asks dryly.

  He shuts his eyes for a few moments, bringing a quiet that Hester jumps on to question Emily.

  “Why do you o know this?”

  “I’m trying to work out a formu to calcute the rough improvement a mage’s body goes through at each assion.”

  “And the range of ical perception will help that?”

  “It will help me work out a few variables, yes.” Emily shrugs, unwilling to go into detail si won’t make sehout revealing the system.

  Hester hums thoughtfully at her response and turtention to Tom as he opens his eyes.

  “Yeah, it’s just shy of two metres,” he affirms with a fident nod.

  “Thank you,” Emily says, shutting her eyes again aurning to her notes.

  To start I o work out a rough formu for perceptie to intelligence. I know my range was: around four and a half metres when I had twenty-two intelligehirty-six metres when I had sixty; and is now one hundred and forty-four when I have one hundred and twenty.

  She immediately spots the obvious pattern in her dataset.

  One hundred and forty-four is twelve squared, twelve is one hundred and twenty divided by ten. So it’s just intelligence divided by ten then squared? It fits, and I don’t know if anything else is affeg the perceptie, so I’ll try this for now.

  Emily plugs her friends’ ranges into the temporary formu and notes down the results it gives them.

  Jules: Six metres, intelligence 25

  Tom: Two metres, intelligence 14

  Enzo: Teres, intelligence 32

  She pares the values to the record of her own, seeing the obvious pattern.

  Below twenty for first circle, and forty for sed. My other stats follow the same pattern, but my intelligence seems to fit the values for a circle higher since I have two cultivation systems increasing it.

  The information falls into pce as Emily brings the stat values bad retes them to Gaius’ findings, f her notes into a suct breakdown of a mage’s improvement against her own.

  Mortals have a limit on their stats, keeping them ten and below.

  Awakening raises the body’s limit to twenty in all stats and increases all stats marginally.

  Each subsequent awakening doubles the limit of a vocation’s main stats: intelligenages; intelligence, agility, aerity for meics.

  My intelligencreases to the limit of the circle up.

  Fifth circle and beyond may not follow this pattern.

  A satisfied smile parts her lips as she finishes and opens her eyes, looking at the ill floating in her vision.

  I ’t be certain that the main stats limit doubles for fourth circle until I get there myself, and I’m not sure if my system’s stats represent a linear improvement or not, but this will do for now.

  “Done,” Emily says fidently to her friends, all of them waiting for her results. “When you awaken, your body’s power limit doubles. Meaning from first to fourth circle, you should grow to be about twice as fast, strong, and resilient as the stro mortal possible.”

  Her friends take in her words, each having differeions. Dante seems disappoiom excited for his future prospects, and Juliana curious.

  “Does that include people like me who don’t train our bodies at all?” she asks Emily, tilting her head.

  “Yes.” Emily nods, finishing off her fish and casting se oe. “Training your body will help push it towards the limit, but I believe any mage that reaches fourth circle will automatically reach that limit anyway. It’s just a case of how soon you reach it.”

  With the plicated topic out of the way, everyone slowly fiheir food before settling down to sleep. Emily and Juliana sit uhe dim light of the array disc, the level reduced so it doesn’t bother their sleeping teammates, with Juliana weaving, and Emily’s hands a blur of trolled motion as she pulls materials from her ste and uses some simple spells to form them into shape.

  The night watch passes without a single beast enter, other than a few fish swimming by ued in their group on nd. In the m, after the magical light of the crystals overhead returns, they set off downstream again.

  They follow the river along, harvesting a few herb outcrops along the way and killing more bugs and piranhas. e lunchtime, they settle down at the water’s edge, most of them with their shoes off and their trousers rolled up, hanging their legs into the water.

  The fog beh the surface s around their legs, swirling in mesmerising patterns as it’s disturbed, hiding the depths beh from view.

  “It’s kinda uling not being able to see my legs. What if a fish bites me?” Tom ents, shivering slightly at the thought of the piranha’s vicious teeth.

  “Ha, it’s not the bites you should be worried about,” Emily says with a mischievous grin, taking a bite from her crispy grilled fish. “They’d cut ys off with water bdes before eating them, you know.”

  Tom pales slightly looking at Emily with a pleading gaze.

  “There aren’t any in here, right?”

  Emily says nothing, maintaining eye tact as she eats, her grin never fading.

  “Stop being so mean,” Juliana, sitting beside Emily with her legs curled up on the shore o her, chides, poking Emily in the side.

  Emily relents, chug as she breaks eye tad looks out into the water at her small boat getting closer. She drives it right up ts and pulls it out, pulling a metal key from her ste to manually wind the engine.

  “No, there aren’t any,” she finally answers, to Tom’s relief. “I’d see any ing through this little guy.”

  Tom lets out a sigh as Dante looks curiously at the boat in her hands as she slots the key into pd begins turning it.

  “Why do you o wind that o not your birds?” he asks curiously.

  Emily looks at him with her brows raised, surprised he’d ask about anything non-explosive.

  “This one had more free space sihe internal meisms are very simple, so I have a wind up motor and it basically run alone, with only slight input to ehe correct propellers to steer it. The birds and spiders, oher hand, rely purely on me moving their internal pos with the magipo of mana,” she expins, lying slightly and g they run on lightning mana instead of maa, an equally possible but far less effit method for her.

  “Cool. Does that mean you could power vehicles with mana? I didn’t realise that ossible.”

  “Yes, I could. Though the engines would be very different from the steam engines we use now.”

  Emily releases the boat bato the water and they finish eating before tinuing on their journey.

  Thirty mier, at the mouth of a three-lit in the river, Emily’s boat detects a group of four new beasts swimming towards them through the strong currents deep under water. They’re much thihan the piranhas, only about the size of a fist across, but they’re four times longer.

  Eels?

  Emily follows her usual routine, summoning a rge orb of lightning above the water, alerting her friends. They turn their heads to look at the crag orb without much , already used to Emily wiping out their waterborne oppos.

  She holds the orb up, waiting for the eels to get closer. The moment they are beside the group, she drops the orb into the water, releasing a burst of steam as the water is charged with deadly voltage.

  However, instead of floating to the surface stunned or dead like the piranhas, the eels turn towards her. Emily feels mana building up around them and quickly summons a bubble of water to protect the group.

  A sed ter, four loud, hissing cracks ring out as four thin streams of lightning shoot from the water, smashing into her barrier. The lightning crackles against the bubble, uo pop it, and is harmlessly diffused. After a sed of elling, the streams fade, and fged spears of water are revealed to Emily’s startled friends, floating above the river ready to strike back at their attackers.

  They watch as Emily calmly flicks her wrist downwards, sending the spears plunging down towards their targets below. The magical structs cut through the water without meetiand accurately impale the two eels closest to the surface. The others sense a disturban the water and quickly flick their agile bodies into a different shape, narrowly dodging the untargeted spells.

  Emily clicks her tongue and starts trying to cast the same spell again, only to meet resistance from the water. Her influence over external mana weakens immehe deeper into the water she tries to form the spears, destabilising the delicate bance required to form her spell.

  Damn. I had a feeling the water here would cause issues, but I didn’t think it would be this bad. This is at least five times worse than it should be for casting a spell fifteeres away. It feels more like casting at the very edge of my range.

  As she’s f her spells, itting to casting ier close to the eels, the eels charge up another shot. This time, Emily watches the water bubble before two streams of lightning shoot out, hitting her barrier at the same point. She raises a brow at the mana cost to block the blow equalling that of the four individual streams earlier, as the impact sends stronger ripples through her barrier, which dissipates the ford charge behind the attack.

  They’re quite clever.

  Her thought is punctuated as she sends two spears of water slig up through the eels’ heads from below, too close and fast for them to dodge when they are distracted by their own attack. Emily dispels her barrier and watches through her boat’s s as the four corpses start to sink. She frowns and sends out a burst of mana, bending the water forcefully and pulling the bodies in.

  “I didn’t expey fish to be able to survive your attacks,” Juliana ents, calming her breath from the shock of the exge.

  “They’re lightning eels,” Emily says, raising one of the bodies out of the water and into her hand with her spell. “It’s only natural they’d shrug off a dispersed sed circle lightning spell. I didn’t realise what they were at first and wasted my initial attack.”

  “Wait, those orbs are sed circle?” Tom asks in fusion.

  “Yeah. You think I’ve been wasting mana on third circle spells every time we meet piranhas? You should be able to tell from the agic circle: I was internal casting that one.”

  Emily igom’s follow-up question about what internal casting is, leaving her friends to expin it to him, and instead focuses on the eel in her hand. It has dark skin, traced by faintly glowing blue lihat ect to several spines running down its body in rings, the tips glittering like crystals.

  “How pretty,” Juliana says o her, admiring the fish.

  “Mm,” Emily hums in agreement, squeezing one of the deceptively soft spines between her fingers. “Pretty and useful. I’m always happy to have more lightning attribute materials.”

  She sends the corpses into her belt and turns to tinue forward. They trek through the tunnel, with Emily keeping a keen eye on her boat’s sing, hoping to find more lightning eels.

  Unfortunately, they only run into more piranhas and bugs for the rest of the day, the only other beast they enter being a few earth maniputing moles that attempt to colpse the tunnel on them. Emily notices them with her spider scout before they get the ce, as Enzo and Ivor to reinforce the roof as she waits for the moles to pop out and attack directly after their spell’s blocked.

  She quickly dispatches them with a few well pced bullets and moves on. They eventually settle down beside the river again for the evening, cooking a mix of bugs and fish to sate their appetites, before passing the night in their usual fashion.

  The days in the cave system slowly blend together, with four more passing without more excitement than a small of aciditipedes guarding a small outcrop of light crystals.

  However, five days after their enter with the lightning eels, the monotony of their journey is broken as they step out into a wide-open cavern. In the tre of the cavern is a glittering ke and, gng around the room hopefully while sending a bird with a light pack to illumihe walls shrouded in darkness, Emily’s gaze quickly es to rest on the bloody writing sittily where they left it before.

  “We found it,” she says with glee, aed grin spreading as she turns her focus to the ke, trying to peer through the water to the gaping hole below. “Time to see where you lead!”

  KeroKeron