Assassin: An Isekai LitRPG Adventure (Ends of Magic Book 3), page 29
“To set aside these ‘charges’ – why only a gas?” Dalo asked. “Can this ‘plasma’ come from something solid as well?”
“Not usually. Everything transitions from solid to liquid to gas to plasma as it gets hotter. There’s a few exceptions. Depending on pressure you can go straight from solid to gas… or from solid to plasma. But you’d have to have an incredibly high pressure for that…”
Nathan shook his head to avoid getting distracted. “Regardless. Anything can become plasma if you get it hot enough, but it won’t stay that way unless you keep it hot. You can also make it with lightning. The creation of plasma has a lot to do with why lightning is loud.”
Dalo blinked at him. “What? Every time I use a lightning spell I’m creating this… plasma? But it does not seem so dangerous then. Well, no more than a normal lightning bolt.”
Nathan chuckled. “Yes. More dangerous things can happen when you make very dense and very hot plasma, like the spell you cast on the Grave Tangle. There’s a point you can hit where a different kind of reaction starts happening.” He locked eyes with Stella. “That’s a very different level of Insight, and far more dangerous. Do not keep compressing and heating plasma to see how far you can go. It will explode violently and uncontrollably, and convey silent death all around.”
She pouted slightly, clearly curious what he meant by ‘silent death.’
High-tier Lecturing 3 achieved!
He glanced at Dalo. “I’m honestly impressed that you survived making a spell that involved that as a component. On Earth our first tests with that kind of power made a column of fire ten thousand feet tall and a crater a mile-and-a-half across. The island where it happened was poisoned for generations.”
Stella’s eyes lit up at Nathan’s words, and Kullal shot him a worried look.
Nathan held up a finger in front of Stella. “That crater was centered on the place where the compression happened. Don’t try it unless you can survive being at the heart of an explosion that would leave a smoking crater where Old Gemore stands. Not Gemore. The entire ruin of Old Gemore, gone.” He lowered his finger and turned back to Dalo.
“Still, it takes an utterly ludicrous amount of power to get there. I have to imagine you had help from Davrar. A skill that makes things easier to burn?” Nathan cocked an eyebrow at the old mage.
Magical Intuition 4 achieved!
Dalo frowned unhappily but gave a slow nod. “Something like that. This… silent death you speak of, I would learn more. I think of it as a malign and invisible energy.”
Nathan looked between Dalo and Kullal, eyebrows raised. “Speaking about it will only make it easier to achieve. Shield yourself whenever you use this magic, and heal yourself frequently. That should be enough.”
I’m pretty sure [Curing] fixes cancers, after all.
Stella interrupted. “You all prophesy the dangers, when it’s been decided I won’t even learn about it! Let’s skip over it and talk about plasma.”
Kullal closed her eyes and bowed her head, giving Nathan a sign to proceed.
He shrugged. “Right, plasma. It’s a mixture of positive and negative charges that are more separate from each other than in any other state of matter. In fact, it’s common for the negative charges to fly off since they’re so much smaller, leaving you with a plasma that’s overall positively charged.”
“Smaller charges? Just more of them?” Stella asked, looking confused.
Nathan shook his head. “No, sorry. They’ve got the same charge, but they’re physically smaller and move much faster. We call them electrons.”
“What are the positive charges called?”
I don’t want to go down nuclear theory right now. Maybe later. But it’s not really necessary for now, and I don’t know how easily that Insight leads to fission magic or something like that.
“Protons. But this all touches on a much deeper Insight that I don’t want to get into and isn’t important right now. In a plasma, you have a ton of individual charges floating around. That means three important things.” Nathan raised three fingers.
“First, the particles affect each other because of the charge.” He held up his two fists a foot apart. “In a normal gas, if this particle moves, nothing happens to this one until they touch.” He moved his fists together until they bounced off each other. “But in a plasma, the particles will affect each other from a distance, usually repelling one another because they’re both positive.” He moved one fist towards the other, but this time the second hand moved away from it.
Kullal frowned. “Are all things made of particles?”
“Mom! Stop interrupting,” Stella scolded her. “Both of you, I’d trade a grand Insight for silence. But yes. Everything is particles. Particles of what, I’d like to know.” She gave Nathan a glare.
Aarl chuckled from the side. “Ahh, Caxol family arguments.”
Everybody involved in the conversation turned their ire on the source of the interruption for a moment, and the swordsman quailed before them and raised his hands in surrender.
Nathan continued, raising two fingers. “That has really important implications. It means that even though a plasma acts like air in some ways, it acts like water in others. It can have waves and other group behaviors in a way air doesn’t. It’s harder to pressurize.”
“Scholars and their interests. Where’d they find a fourth Caxol?” Stanel said quietly to Kia from the side.
I’m pretty sure he just called me a nerd. But who wouldn’t nerd out about using science to do magic?
Stella’s expression cleared. “So it’s not just hot air!”
Nathan chuckled at her phrasing. “No. The second point is that you can separate out the charges with an electric field, but it’s harder the denser the plasma. If you put a plasma in a strong electric field and then slice it in half, one half will be more ‘positive’ and the other will be more ‘negative’. They’ll be really unstable but pack a lot of energy. And the high charge means they’ll be easier to move around with electric fields. Do you understand?”
“I think so?” Stella said, her brows scrunched up. “Earlier I did the containment with magnetic fields, is that the right idea?”
“Yeah.” Nathan nodded. “That’s a good way to do it, but you also need to prevent any air from touching it. You remember pulling out all of the air from a bubble to make a vacuum when you were working on the light Insight? Like that.”
Dalo shot an utterly bewildered look at Kullal, mouthing the word ‘field’ questioningly. She shrugged in response.
“Right. Third and last point. Plasma is an incredibly good conductor of lightning – electricity. You’ve already used this. Remember when you destroyed the Old Gemore siege constructs, when your lightning followed their beams of light back to the source?”
“That was plasma?” Stella looked satisfied. “So those light beams were strong enough to make plasma, which was a path for the electricity mana to flow down? You mentioned aiming lightning with light, but I haven’t gotten the chance to try it.”
“Yes. We call them electrolasers, but they don’t need to make a lot of plasma, just a little bit. Then the electricity will flow and make more. The same thing happens whenever you connect a lightning bolt to something. That’s why you can keep channeling it and it mostly follows the same path. But if you control the plasma, it’ll help you control the flow of lightning.”
High-tier Lecturing 4 achieved!
Stella collapsed back in her chair. “I need to try some magic.”
Nathan smirked. “Go ahead. I don’t have any other plans.”
Aarl stood. “If this is our last night in Halsmet, then I do. See you in the morning.”
Chapter 26
Departures into the Unknown
Nathan spent the next few hours helping Stella apply his lessons on plasma. His better mana senses made the whole process much easier than when he’d been trying to help her gain light mana, and his control over his antimagic helped him snuff the experiments before anything went out of control.
Stella had also improved as a mage. Her control was better, and she could more easily construct a spell of several different kinds of mana, which was necessary for these spells. It was looking like effective plasma spells would require fire, lightning, magnetic and air mana. They found that light mana helped with the containment, too.
Dalo and Kullal were doing their own experimentation alongside their daughter, but Nathan wasn’t paying them as much attention beyond occasionally checking to make sure they weren’t doing something stupid. Overall they seemed much more safety-conscious than their daughter, and Nathan felt confident leaving them to their own devices.
After all, they figured out a good deal of this without me. Pretty impressive.
Kia and Stanel seemed to be playing some kind of drinking game they’d devised a long time ago for whenever Dalo and Kullal started talking about magic. They were teaching the rules to Khachi and Sarah, and it appeared that the game might become a tradition of the Heirs as well as the Guardians.
Over time, it became clear that Stella’s class gave her a significant advantage in trying to apply Nathan’s Insights into the natural world. She was a [Mage of the Natural Law], and had skills to boost her magic when it aligned with the principles of the physical world. Those same skills let her know when her experimentation was on the right track, and over the course of the evening she assembled a crude and misshapen mass of a spell that nonetheless was capable of creating and manipulating a vibrating orb of purple plasma with diffuse edges.
Nathan watched as Stella tweaked the magnetic containment. “Well done. Let’s see if you can get a handle on accelerating it with an electric field.”
“Hear me, that spellwork is atrocious!” Kullal protested, glancing over from where she was working with a multi-layered orb of force and flame. “You can’t hit the target with something so… so inelegant.”
“It’s just for experimentation,” Stella said absently as she prodded the sphere with different kinds of mana. “I need to understand the mana, feel its essential nature…”
Kullal glared at Nathan. “That can’t be an effective way to learn! Every spell she makes will bear the scars of this... this stalker shit spell.”
Nathan smirked. “I disagree. You always need to experiment to learn. Once you understand what you’re doing, then it’s time to optimize.”
The best scientific equipment is usually the kind that’s kludged together somewhere. If you’re using standard equipment and reagents, you’re usually not doing something new.
Dalo watched the whole conversation with a frown, chewing on his lip without interjecting. He could generate plasma easily, but had never been able to manipulate it much.
Stella could. Her expression focused, she started to spin the ball of plasma. Her eyebrows rose in surprise as the edges grew notably brighter than the center, the hazy mass becoming more clearly defined.
Nathan stepped up, ready to swallow the spell in antimagic if it threatened to break free. But the spell was stable and he studied it for a second before making a suggestion. “Try putting a magnetic field in the middle, so you have a disk with a hole in it.”
The orb flattened out as it spun further, then the center dented inward to form a torus that wobbled alarmingly. Stella’s voice was absentminded, her focus on managing the spell. “A tube with no end. The charges respond better to the magnetic field if they’re moving. It’s more stable if they’re not just sitting there…”
The vibrating toroid flexed slightly, then adapted a slight spiral around its length. The plasma condensed even farther and brightened, but the faint vibration smoothed out entirely. Stella’s mouth was open in astonishment, before she shot both hands into the air in triumph. “Yes!” With her inattention, the spell in front of Stella began to destabilize.
Dalo and Kullal started to cast their own magics to control the blast as a puff of sizzling heat escaped. But Nathan beat them to it, swooping in with his aura to wipe the magic away before it filled the room with fire.
Stella’s parents rounded on her with expressions of annoyance, but before they could say anything she gestured to Nathan with both hands. “He’s right here! The best safety mechanism for chasing a grand Insight.”
Then she smiled wide, and her eyes shining with a distinctive purple glare. “It worked, too. I got plasma mana!”
High-tier Lecturing 5 achieved!
Nathan clapped his hands together and cheered. Dalo and Kullal looked astonished. Everybody else took a shot.
After processing for a moment, Dalo looked like he was going to start pulling his hair out. “My daughter, be careful of your mana storage! Too many mana types may interfere. That would prophesy a disaster.”
She smirked at him, refusing to let the mood be brought down. “Oh, I didn’t mention. We looted a dragon’s hoard of prismatic diamond from an Edrani Empire fortress.” She reached into one of the dimensional pockets of her robes and pulled out a head-sized chunk of the crystal that had served as the power core of that particular dungeon. “It’s unnaturally made, but there’s about fifty pounds of it.”
This time even Stanel and Kia gaped in amazement.
Dalo sighed and shrugged, but his face was split in a satisfied smile. “Success beyond prophecy.”
From there, the night degenerated into another party, and Nathan had to convince Stella it wasn’t a good idea to try inventing plasma spells while drunk. At least not powerful ones.
The Heirs woke up bright and early the next morning because Sudraiel sent somebody to bring them food. They’d definitely gone to bed later than they should have. Aarl had gotten to their rooms slightly before they did, looking smug and freshly bathed.
At least the food was good. Stella was still over the moon about her new mana type. “I can put it into fireballs. Force and fire – and plasma!”
She was practically bouncing off the walls. Nathan was somewhat doubtful she’d slept much at all.
“I bet it’ll be great for giving lightning spells more punch, or guiding them!” she continued. “Or I can combine light and plasma to make the perfect channels for lightning to flow through!”
Aarl shook his head. “I am free of regret. My night was excellent entertainment. But it would have been nice to see this Insight develop.”
“You missed learning the magic drinking game,” Sarah said with a snort. “But we can teach you later. We’ll need it again, sure and certain.”
Khachi leaned in. “We’d need alcohol for that. But it is righteous to abstain. I do not think I will carry the hoard my mother keeps.”
Sarah met her brother’s eyes, her voice full of mirth. “I suppose we’ll have to handle it.”
“I hate to break up the party, but we need to go meet Brox,” Nathan said, slapping his knees and standing up. He looked around the room to make sure they weren’t leaving anything behind.
The rest of the Heirs deflated and got up to do their last minute packing.
“Do you think Brox will still use us as Castlebear bait if we’re funny?” Aarl asked.
Everybody looked at Nathan, who shrugged. “I get the sense he’d love it if we were entertaining, but I don’t know if it’ll make him really care about us. Maybe a little. Remember, our main goal is to keep our distance, and not be too impressed.”
He met Stella’s eyes. The red-haired mage was suddenly subdued. “It’ll be fine,” he reassured her. “Just be conscious of yourself and focus on your mental skills.”
They left the room, bidding goodbye to the elites on either side of the door. It was Turbang and Datur, who seemed relieved to hear that the Heirs wouldn’t need to be guarded anymore.
“Algoa’s luck ride with you,” Datur said, clasping his hands in a salute. “You might need it with your final companion.”
Good to know that not all of the Halsmet elites worship Brox.
They were supposed to meet Brox in the courtyard, but he wasn’t there. The Heirs moved into the garden, which was starting to show some rough edges. It hadn’t been totally abandoned, but the manicured greenery was clearly being allowed to slip from absolute perfection.
They watched as petitioners and messengers streamed in and out of the mansion, and a group of Halsmet citizens did weapon practice under the command of Stanel.
Oh yeah, he trains the Gemore Guard. Makes sense he’d start that up for Halsmet.
Brox did eventually show up, strolling leisurely into the central courtyard from the lower city, yawning and rubbing sleep from his eyes. His eyes locked onto Nathan and his teammates, and with a small gust of wind, the Questor appeared before them, arms wide and a smile on his face.
“My friends! Let our journey begin. I will allow you to set the pace – but by the oaths of Edes it better not be too slow.” He raised his eyebrows and waggled his finger on the last line, then gestured towards the gate.
Seems like kidding-not-really kidding.
Khachi nodded mechanically, then turned towards the gate and took off at a jog. The rest of the Heirs followed, blowing past the group of trainees. Brox caught up in a moment, running backwards just a bit to the side.
Nathan caught Stanel throwing a venomous look towards the Questor, but Brox didn’t seem to notice or care.
“Ah, a good effort. Now we shall see how long you can maintain it! I always say, good legs and good lungs are as important as a strong arm,” the Questor declared, not breathing any differently despite running backwards at a fast pace.
They exited the mansion and headed down the broad road that was the quickest way to the east gate. Brox kept on running backwards, dodging around anybody in his path with quick bursts of speed. He wore an indulgent expression as he kept talking. “A few hundred years ago I was leading an army out of the city-state of Aflela to fight Keihona over a trade route. We were both racing to the pass of Lightning. Archery armies desire the high ground, I tell you.”
He smirked. “Verified truth, we got there first. Sarya tried to hold us off by herself until her army arrived, but I chased her off and we took the position. She had better archers, but with the high ground it wasn’t an even contest. We won that war off legs, not bows. Took her a decade to forgive me for that one.”
