The morning after Bobby returned to Algamoon he finally decided to put some more work into learning the spells he’d been intending to. There were two he wanted to focus on, the first being the one that let him summon and manipulate a filament of magic and the second being a localised gravity spell that if used nefariously could target specific components of someone’s body to rip them apart.

  Beginning with the filament spell he immersed himself in the knowledge fragments of its usage that had been forced into his head. The new spell was a much simpler one than the orb of annihilation he’d previously learned, instead of weaving a construct that then transformed into a spell; this spell actually was the weave you created, although somehow due to the pattern it was able to manifest itself physically.

  Bobby tried to figure out why that was the case, but the only clue he was able to pluck from the knowledge was that it was related to the affinity of the magic. He couldn’t find out anymore about what magical affinity was, but if it was anything like it was in games then he was probably attuned to soul or death and the spells were constructs that could convert his magic into other types.

  The thoughts sounded right, but he had no way to confirm them so he didn’t linger much on them and instead moved to what he did know. This spell involved weaving the magic into a rope like configuration, then by signalling the individual magic threads that would anchor it to his hand, he would be able to widen or narrow it or stretch out its length. The spell would last until he stopped providing magic to it.

  He let himself outside after remembering the previous damage he had caused by casting spells inside, then beginning slowly he drew out threads of his magic and began weaving and twisting them together. The spell started with a kind of end knot and then it had a pretty uniform structure all the way along.

  Bobby stopped weaving when the woven filament reached approximately the length of his arm, it was long enough to experiment with, but shouldn’t be too catastrophic if he’d somehow cast it wrong. The filament was kind of bluish in colour to the naked eye and looked like a glowing string. Taking the length he chose a random small pile of rubble and swung down the filament and… oh.

  To the magical sight of his third eye a small imperfection caused one of the threads of his filament to break and the rest of the weave to untangle until with a flash the construct broke apart catastrophically and faded into a cloud of blue magic that he felt like he no longer had any control over.

  He stared intently at the cloud of blue magic and waved his hand through it, it had the physical sensation somewhere between a blanket and a liquid and little eddies swam around his fingers fluidly. So it’s important to make sure the structure and magic threads are as uniform as possible.

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  Bobby carefully focused on casting the spell again, this time being as slow and methodical as possible, carefully observing the whole process from beginning to end and correcting the mistakes as he made them. After about five minutes he once again had a construct around the length of his arm dangling in front of him. Although this time it was different to the last time.

  [Dexterity 40 → 41]

  Firstly this spell glowed a lot brighter, with a slight afterglow where he moved it, a careful inspection with his third eye showed it was steadily emitting a constant stream of tiny light blue particles that faded after about a second. The second difference was somehow he could intuitively sense how to change its length and diameter, it was like he had some sort of muscle memory for it. Experimentally he fiddled around with it, making it first the shape of a pickle and then like a giant whip.

  Then he swung it down into the rubble again with great gusto, this time there was a crack and although nothing broke, the whole pile vibrated and shifted around a bit. Curious how far he could take the spell, he made it as thin as it would physically go and hit the pile again. This time the thin blue line of the spell sliced cleanly into the rock, scoring a borderline microscopic cut through it.

  He widened his eyes at the damage, these spells always seemed to surprise him at how effective they were. Now for the other spell.

  The fragments of this spell showed that it had a key difference to his other spells, namely it was meant to be cast with one's feet rather than their hands. Curious about this bizarre difference he focused more on the other aspects of the spell, finding the casting process actually resembled a kind of dance. I’m gonna look ridiculous casting this, although maybe that’s the point, maybe the spell being so ridiculous distracts your opponent until you have time to cast it.

  Bobby marvelled at the precision of the movements of the person in the knowledge fragments, he knew his attempts would be clumsy, but perhaps the memory of the person would prove to be a better teacher than a real one would be.

  Five minutes later he very much disagreed with himself. He was terrible at dancing. Although he could cast like a third of the spell before he stumbled, he had none of the ability to smooth out his motions, it all sort of ended up as awkward and unsure juddering.

  Beginning again he decided to take it slow, checking where his legs should be at each step of the spell as he channeled magic from his feet into the floor. Due to the spell not using hands, it didn’t work via conventional weaving, instead he sort of imprinted a woven looking pattern onto the floor, dragging his feet around so it was layering the magic on top of itself.

  This time he managed to make way more progress, although his concentration on the magic sort of lapsed as he was trying to do the movements towards the end and although he managed to finish the movements mostly correctly, the spell had mostly faded and therefore didn’t activate.

  Bobby sighed as he looked down at the marks in the dusty ground left by dragging his feet around. This is going to take a lot more practice…

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