A boy stood quietly in the middle of a large meadow.
His warm breaths could be made out against the surrounding cold air.
Despite the cold, blackened grass was laid out in a large strip facing the boy's figure.
It looked as if a tiny portion of very hot fire had passed through the meadow and spared the rest of the grass.
...Which wasn't too removed from what actually happened.
Otto concentrated and dual cast two spells for what felt like the millionth time that day.
[Lesser Fireball: Unlimited]
[Fire Arrow: Unlimited]
But this time, he wasn't trying to reduce his cast times.
No.
At this point, his training period was actually almost over.
Most of the required goals he'd set for himself were met. Or else, they wouldn't be met by the time he ascended to the second floor.
Today, though, Otto was focused on something different.
An experiment, of sorts.
To fuse two spells together.
As far as he knew, which apparently wasn't much, spell fusion should be an impossible task.
At least, it was well outside of all his knowledge.
So Otto thought long and hard about what this fusion would, or could, actually mean.
Normally, when Otto cast a spell, there was a specific process that happened in his body.
First, he mobilized the mana with his brain.
His mental power carried his 'intent' to cast a specific spell.
The mana would then move from where it was stored in his mana pool, through one cycle on a specific pathway around his magic network.
Said pathway was specific to the spell Otto wished to cast.
If Otto was casting a second circle spell or a third circle spell, there would be two or three respective cycles.
There were also endless variations of these cycles which could theoretically produce endless types of spells.
Well, perhaps not exactly endless, but there were thousands of pathways and mana veins in his body.
In order to better understand how mana moved, Otto also studied how the pathways changed in order to cast each element.
One of his class traits was an [Ethereal Network]: Otto's magic network did not take on a specific elemental variation.
If he cast a water spell, for example, his network would, for lack of a better word, undulate with the mana that moved through it (though not literally).
Whereas for an earth spell, the veins would be sturdy and more or less inflexible.
So how was he to fuse two spells together? These spells required entirely different motions of Otto's mana.
Moreover, the spells for different elements essentially required his entire magic network to take on differing characteristics.
For Otto's first experiment, he decided to attempt it with the two spells carrying the most similar pathways through his mana veins.
Which happened to be [Lesser Fireball: Unlimited] and [Fire Arrow: Unlimited].
He initially tried dual casting the two together, faster and faster, until he reached his absolute top speed.
Then, he sort of just stepped back slightly from the process and hoped they would blend if they were cast quickly enough.
As might have been expected, this experiment was an abject failure.
The mana for each spell stayed separate no matter what Otto tried.
Hence, the big scorch marks on the grass in front of him and the semi-frustrated look on Otto's face.
Otto sat back down on the grass, heedless of the ash under him.
He conjured up two spell models from memory.
An hour slowly passed.
Otto carefully studied both models.
He wanted to figure out if he could make a new spell if he fused them.
Thankfully, both spells were of the unlimited variety, meaning he understood them backwards and forwards.
In the end, these models only differed in eleven small pathways.
Otto thought that these eleven distinctions might be responsible for the shape difference between a fire 'ball' and a fire 'arrow.'
His eyes narrowed as he pondered.
At the final part of casting any spell, the mana was released from Otto's magic network through a small opening in a mana vein.
The opening could occur essentially wherever Otto wished, though there were bigger, more flexible openings at, for example, his fingers.
What if, instead of releasing each spell once, he combined their openings?
Then released them at precisely the same place at exactly the same time?
Since mana was half-immaterial, it might be possible to do.
Otto tried it once.
This time, he slowed down his casting speed significantly, taking almost two entire seconds to record the process in his brain.
He brought both spells to the very tip of his index finger and released them at exactly the same time.
A small blob of fire with an arrow running through it emerged from his finger.
It set the grass on fire once more.
Otto sighed.
Not exactly a failure, as the two spells did technically merge.
But also not a success, as it was obvious they hadn't 'fused' in the truest sense of the word.
Apparently, occupying the same spot was not the requirement for spell fusion.
He went back to studying the spell models, trying experiment after experiment in new and zany attempts to combine the two spells.
Yet not a single one of his dozens of experiments proved successful.
The two spells just did not want to fuse!
Eventually, Otto decided to change his thinking slightly, to look at the problem in another light.
What if, instead of casting both spells simultaneously using each part of his split brain, he used both parts of his mind to focus on casting a single, 'fused,' spell?
Could he alter the spell model to cast a 'new' spell that fit both the pathways of [Lesser Fireball] and [Fire Arrow]?
Otto's eyes gradually lit up.
He immediately got to work creating a new spell model.
The blueprint took an entire 3 days to come up with, and Otto used another final 12 hours after that to ensure he'd gotten every path correct.
He was running out of time.
But he'd perform this experiment first!
Otto took a deep breath and looked at the now-green grass in front of him.
'This could work.'
He continually reassured himself.
Then, he cautiously roused his mana to move along the new pathways, taking great care to ensure both parts of his brain were focused completely, and only, on this.
Three seconds later, the spell was about to be released.
Otto was beside himself with anticipation.
When suddenly, a blinding white hot pain spread through his finger, where the mana was held.
The mana veins in his finger collapsed entirely!
A shockwave scoured his magic network.
The entire network was almost instantly on the verge of total collapse as his mana spun wildly throughout his body.
His mana went haywire!
Otto gasped in shock and clawed at the ground in pain.
Veins bulged on his face.
He didn't make a sound.
Until he remembered that, thankfully, he was still in his mental space.
"…"
Otto blocked out the so-called 'pain.'
It took over five minutes for the shockwave to subside.
By that time, his magic network had crumbled until not even a piece of his magic network was left.
Worse was that his body was also on the verge of falling apart after his mana escaped from its veins and rampaged around his internal organs.
Had this been out in the real world rather than in his mental space, Otto would have been forced to kill himself and lose a life to regain his magic casting capability.
This kind of damage was unlikely to be repairable.
Healing spells and the like could repair his body, but injuries to the magic network were typically impossible to recover from.
Otto continued to pant as he slowly repaired his magic network with his mind.
And started to ponder.
'What in the tower just happened to me?'
There was no doubt that it was an unmitigated disaster.
But somehow, Otto also thought that he might have been on the right track.
At least there WAS a reaction this time!
The reaction was actually called a 'magic backlash.'
It typically occurred in a much, much more muted manner when a mage was on the verge of casting a spell, but was interrupted directly.
When that happened, the mage would be forced to 'swallow' the mana back.
The problem was that its forward momentum from the almost completed spell would cause a tiny bit of mana to rampage throughout the magic network.
Back in the underground cave on the first floor, had Agatha been able to force Otto to 'swallow' his mana by directly interrupting, instead of delaying or smothering his mana with her own, his state would have been a lot worse…
What Otto couldn't understand here was why the backlash had been so large this time.
He actually began to think that it was less to do with the spell itself, and more to do with the [Tower], actually.
It even felt like the [Tower] was trying to send Otto a message, or a warning.
That he didn't have the qualifications to complete a new spell yet.
Well he did learn something through the experiment.
It seemed that this was not the way to go about fusing two spells.
Instead, what he had accidentally done was try to create a new one.
Otto sighed.
He was almost out of time for this experiment, in any case, as badly as he wanted to explore more.
Still, even failure was an extremely valuable thing. It ruled out a possibility and brought Otto a step closer to the truth…
Otto exited his mental space with a light heart.
His impassive expression returned.
He prepared himself.
To face the second floor.
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