Chapter 178: Mana Field
I’m simply stating the obvious, host.
"Tsk... Well I don’t need the input, Aegis, thank you." Zephyr drawled, huffing.
He turned his attention back to his spell, "Where was I?"
"Yeah, attack, defense and concealment..."
Besides the spell he’d just executed now, there were others he was sure to think of if he put his mind to it, but he instead moved to his lacking aspects — constant defense and concealment.
For defense, the first thing that came to his mind was the mana barrier. But he discarded it, unwilling to go down that route. It was way too easy and straightforward. His only spell for defense so far...
At the end of the day, the mana barrier spell he used was still a spin-off of the Ryvelin-made Mana Barrier spell. He had only tweaked it slightly to match his needs — by removing the golden glow and making it transparent.
So he wanted to do something different this time. Something that was going to be his from the ground up.
He first thought of what a defensive spell aimed to do at its core, which was to protect the caster from harm.
The spell could achieve this in three major ways – either by deflecting the attack, by killing its force and momentum, or by negating it totally, preventing it from being cast at all — though that would require extreme skill.
The mana barrier spell was a defensive spell that acted as a shield, killing the force of the spell at the point of impact.
It used mana to create a solid structure that was durable enough to prevent damage to the caster. And its durability was solely dependent on the caster’s skill — how long and how powerfully he or she could feed mana into the structure.
But Zephyr wasn’t going about it this way this time.
Instead he was looking at the first method, which was deflecting.
To other mages, it may look high-requirement compared to making one single solid structure.
The deflecting spell would be all encompassing, deviating attacks from whichever angle they may come from.
Most mages could handle a spell like that when facing a single enemy, but when being barraged by multiple enemies, there were more things for their mana nodes to take into consideration – angle of attack, direction of redirection...
Zephyr could handle this easily with his ALU, so it would prove no problem for him.
He immediately started to visualize the spell, thinking of what exactly he wanted it to do...
He discarded the idea of using wind magic to create the spell. It would be too noisy, scattering dust into the air as he moved. Anyone would be able to tell he had a spell running from a distance.
No.
What he wanted was to address force itself. Momentum. Energy.
What were they at their crux?
He thought of everything he knew about them. The little bits he had pondered on during moments he had nothing to do. The little snippets of random information he got from Aegis here and there.
"Alright, I know momentum at its core is just mass multiplied by velocity, moving in a straight line unless acted upon." Zephyr analyzed. "Stopping it head on would mean I’d have to match that energy perfectly... which would be too wasteful."
"But if I can catch that energy and bend it... like water flowing around a stone..." he muttered.
Force wasn’t physically tangible in the same way other objects were. He couldn’t just grab and shape it out of thin air.
So to guide an attack coming at him, all he needed to do was create a surface that could glance force off. It was all about angles and surfaces.
Instead of a solid obstruction like the mana barrier, Zephyr focused on creating something malleable. Something unfixed, that would sense the angle of attack a projectile was coming from, and would shape the barrier like a passage to redirect it off course.
As Zephyr visualized, his mana node went to work, executing his intentions.
Instead of a mana barrier, what was being actualized was more like a mana field. One that spread round Zephyr in ball directions.
Zephyr’s eyes were closed in concentration as he visualized the spell, feeling it come into reality as he wanted.
’Wait... if I play this right, I can even turn this into an attack spell too...’ the thought suddenly came to mind.
If it was all about redirecting force, depending on how proficient he was with it, he could redirect any projectile to loop around and attack the enemy with the same or nearly the same force as they had attacked him.
And for that he needed enough time for his ALU to register and decide what to do with an incoming attack.
To do that, he pushed the limit of his range further, straining to get to 3ft (0.9m), a range that he could maintain without his mind getting taxed heavily. A range easily manageable in the background.
Zephyr opened his eyes calmly, letting out a breath.
Congratulations, host. I applaud your execution. What would you like to name the spell?
Aegis suddenly inputted with a genuine appreciation to its tone.Zephyr noted it and smirked slightly, "I think I should test it out first before naming it, no?" he walked out into the hot open, flicking a rock up high into the air with an earth spell.
It came down at him and he turned his gaze away, waiting for it to get within his 3ft mana field range.
Like as if he suddenly had an extra sense, he felt the rock enter his mana field and quickly reacted, consciously guiding its path from above, snaking it around himself before sling-shotting it into the distance in a fluid movement.
"Whoa ho ho! That was actually cool." Zephyr chuckled.
He had felt his ALU default to deflecting it away at first, but his conscious awareness made it such that he could control its path the way he just had.
"I guess I can only do that in specific scenarios..." Zephyr mused.
He had only been able to do this because of his quick reaction time as a nano-enhanced.
One had to know that the time window he had to take control from his ALU and guide a projectile to wherever he wanted was very short.
In the case of the falling rock, it had been around 0.09 seconds (90 milliseconds), and that was just something moving at the speed of this planet’s freefall — which was somewhere around 33 ft/s² (10 m/s²).
Zephyr had taken control in those 90 milliseconds only because of his enhancement.
Which meant that anything moving faster than that speed would prove hard for him to redirect back to the attacker.
He scratched his chin in thought as he and Aegis crunched the numbers.
His idea of weaponizing this redirecting mana field was only going to be feasible for spells that entered his 3ft range at nothing more than 11 or maybe 13m/s.
That would work out to Zephyr having 70 - 85 milliseconds to react and take control of redirecting the spell before he was hit.
Beyond that, he’d only register the spell after his ALU had redirected it away harmlessly — which was its default choice.
And your ALU is also not foolproof, host. Aegis explained. It also has its response time in the millisecond range, which while way faster than you, is still not fast enough to react to some extremely fast moving projectiles.
I estimate a fastest response time of sub 10 milliseconds for your ALU realistically, but 20 or 30 to be on the safe side.
Your fire arrows spell moves at 13m/s, which works out to around 70 milliseconds, just enough to fall within your conscious reaction range. You would be able to redirect spells like these.
But if you instead come across an attack like your compressed fire spell, which moves at nearly 30m/s — requiring 30 millisecond reaction times, you would be totally dependent on your ALU to respond and deflect the spell.
"Damn..." Zephyr hissed.
He had thought himself impervious to all attacks, an auto-reflector of some sort, but it turned out he could only reflect simple spells at the end of the day.
At least his ALU could still help him with deflecting other spells.
’And what sort of speeds can my ALU not react to?’ Zephyr asked tentatively.
Probably projectiles moving at 200m/s speeds? I would say.
That works out to a projectile coming at you at 450 miles an hour speeds (720km/h).
"Hah! That’s way too fast." Zephyr chuckled.
The number seemed very absurd to him. Nothing within his frame of knowledge moved that fast... at least nothing man-made. Not spells for sure.
You would be surprised, host... Aegis responded sarcastically. There are lots of projectiles that move that fast.
Even putting aside things you do not know, I reckon high tiered mages like Smiling Devil should be able to cast spells that reach such speeds.
It really is not that hard.
You just lack imagination.
"..."