“Is there a reason you dislike her so much?” he asked, changing the topic away from Maura’s assets.
“I mean, she’s a bitch. Plenty of reason to hate her. But come on, sit down. Grab a beer from the cooler. Let’s talk. I bet I can help you with whatever your problem is, and tell you why Kadria’s a useless slut. It’ll be fun,” Maura said.
“We could use some fun,” Laura said without looking up. “It gets pretty boring playing the same video games for all eternity.”
Despite his misgivings, Nathan had no choice. Kadria was missing, and he needed help from a succubus.
Plus, he knew so little about the Twins. Unlike Kadria, he appeared to have some level of control over them. Until they invaded through the portal again, they weren’t that threatening.
Although he needed to continue to improve his mental wards. He doubted their next attack would be so weak. Laura’s attempt during the invasion had been worse. If they slipped through his defenses, then everything was over. Playing with the Twins was a dangerous game, even if the reward appeared to be tantalizingly sweet.
Nathan stepped over to a bright blue box on the ground. A multitude of brown bottles sat within it, encased in ice. He reached in and pulled one out. The label was written in a language he didn’t recognize, although it appeared similar to the writing in the Empire.
“Huh. I didn’t know we had German beers in there,” Maura said, staring at the bottle of beer in confusion.
“How do I open this?” Nathan asked. There was a cap on top, but he suspected he’d break the entire top off while trying to remove it.
Maura clicked her fingers and the cap vanished. That was one way, he supposed.
After sitting down, he tasted the beer. It was a lager. For whatever reason, it tasted similar to the ones brewed in the Empire over winter, but far cleaner and it seemed to pop in his mouth.
“I guess there are only so many ways to make beer,” he said.
“And that’s where you’d be wrong,” Maura said.
Nathan didn’t follow up on that statement. Ignorance was bliss, sometimes.
“So, what exciting shit has happened in the world of Nathan the almighty?” Maura asked. A beer had appeared in her hand as well, although it somehow made her look far cruder.
Then again, crude was a very apt description for the Twins. Especially Maura.
“Don’t you pay attention to what’s going on outside?” he asked.
“Can’t.”
He blinked. “But Kadria—”
She growled at him. He rolled his eyes and changed the topic. Clearly, Kadria had a sweeter position than these two busty parasites.
“As a Bastion, I poke into the mental worlds of my Champions. Now that I’m learning about mental magic, I’m realizing how shit I am at it,” he said, deciding to leave his ego out of things and be honest.
This pair were succubi. They knew exactly how competent he was at mental magic. Trying to wave his dick around was an ill-advised proposition.
“Uh, not how I’d describe you,” Maura said with a raised eyebrow.
“I mean, he’s not that great,” Laura mumbled.
“You can shit talk him after you find a way to make him fuck you,” the darker sister snapped. She turned back to Nathan. “We weren’t at the top of our game when we invaded, but you did damn well against us. Most Bastions use magical artifacts to protect themselves, like the old man did. You’re the first one who didn’t. I expected you to be enjoying a nice, long ride while your Champions watched, to be honest.”
A magical artifact? That was the first Nathan had heard of such a thing. He knew that Trafaumh supposedly had some secret anti-succubus weapons, according to Jafeila, but he had never seen any.
“I’ll take the compliment, but the more I learn about ascended magic, the less confident I feel,” he grumbled. “I’m getting pretty good at wards, but I feel so shallow at everything else. As if I’m learning a little bit of everything, but none of it is useful enough for actual application. I think I need to focus on something.”
And mental magic appeared to be the easiest and the most relevant, he thought. He had succubi to teach him, and problems that needed mental magic to solve.
If it turned out there was a succubus behind Fyre, then he’d be ready for her. If he was wrong, then the magic would still be useful against the Twins or to help him with all this political nonsense.
“Hmm. Let’s see if I can’t give you a Kadria-like response.” Maura grinned as she drank her beer. “What you’ve realized is that you’re in school and learning like a child. A little bit of everything, no depth to anything. You either bury yourself in debt to learn the real stuff, or everybody laughs you out of interviews while you suffer in a shitty home with a deadbeat dad.”
“I don’t think Kadria answers like that,” he said drily. “Also, I don’t think that really applies to me.”
“Sure it does.” Maura smirked and leaned toward him. “You can make a deal with me and I can help you escape the doldrums of this world, or you continue sucking at mental magic.”
Yeah, Nathan didn’t think he’d take that deal.
“Uh huh. And how do I learn without selling my soul to you?” he asked, rolling his eyes.
“Tch. Fine,” Maura said. She vanished her beer before standing up and walking over to him. “The answer doesn’t really change, though. I can teach you how to ruin some minds, but you need to let us in.”
“No,” he said, about to stand and leave.
“Wait!” she snapped.
He paused, waiting to see if she offered anything of value.
“You already let Kadria in,” the succubus said. “This won’t be any different. We don’t magically slip past your mental wards. But think about it. Do you really know what that little goat is up to? Do you even know why she brought you here?”
Nathan nearly bought into Maura’s words. She had a point. He didn’t know.
But he did remember the recent conversations he had with Kadria. Most of his problems with her came from not asking for her help. And she had promised she was working on something to help him.
“She said we’re partners,” he said, hoping he wouldn’t regret this. “I don’t think you’re offering the same deal.”
With those words, he stood up and walked to the door. Once Kadria returned, he’d badger her into more lessons.
A pair of arms latched onto his waist before he left.
“Oh, come on!” Maura whined. “This is so unfair. Look, if I explain some of the basics of mental magic, will you at least promise to think about it? It’s so boring in here!”
“You’ll teach me if I think about working with you?” he asked, incredulous.
“Seriously think about it.” Her eyes flashed. “No bullshit. We’re already in this world. We can help you way more than Kadria can, once shit goes down.”
That got his attention.
“Alright, it’s a deal. But you need to explain what you mean by that,” he said.
He sat back down and hoped he hadn’t made a mistake.
Maura pulled out another bottled beer. This one looked substantially different to the one that Nathan had pulled out himself.
He took one sip and frowned. “Is everything you drink a lager?”
“Is that rare or something here?” Maura asked as she sat beside him. Laura appeared uninterested in what they were up to.
“We only brew it in the winter, and it’s only really popular in the Empire. Even then, nothing has the same amount of… pop, that this has.” Nathan shook the bottle, and watched as the beer foamed up.
“That’s carbonation.”
“You mean like in champagne?”
“Oh, so you do know what it is,” Maura said. “Anyway, let’s talk magic, not beer. I drink this stuff, not make it.”
She settled in for what appeared to be a long lecture. Nathan wondered what he was about to learn.
“Let’s start with the basics. I don’t know what yo
u do and don’t know,” Maura said. “Everything comes back to the magic that enters the world through the binding stones.”
“Wait, what?” Nathan asked, sitting up in surprise.
“Huh, you didn’t know that? Yeah, the binding stones draw in magic. That’s why they’re the meeting points of all the leylines. The magic they gather is transferred into the world using those leylines, and life absorbs the ambient magic in the air, ground, and water.” Maura made a face. “Kadria loves to say shit about magic and science, but this stuff always sounds like a physics lesson to me.”
Nathan remained silent. Despite how basic this sounded to Maura, it was confirming things that he had only suspected. Humanity lacked a lot of knowledge on how the world worked.
It was difficult to systematically collect data and prove theorems on reality-bending rocks that doubled as national super weapons.
“Anyway, magic is in everything living. Plants, animals, potatoes, your cock.” She leered at him for a moment. “But you also use it for magic. You guys use those funky spell frames with triangles and pentagons and shit, but it’s all just a way to convert magic into something real.”
“I know this part,” Nathan said. “We need an equivalent amount of magic to create physical things and elements such as fire. The same goes for raw magical spells like barriers, the wireless, and controlling summons. The spell frames amplify magic, letting us use less magic.”
“Bzzzzt, wrong.” Maura poked him.
He stared at her.
“I mean, you’re mostly right, but you’re wrong enough that I bet it’s fucking with your ability to use ascended magic,” she explained. “Look, magic is just energy. So is everything else. Fire? That’s just heat and light. Is something moving? That’s what we call kinetic energy. Your barriers are just huge walls of glowing kinetic energy—that’s why they break. If you hit them with more force than they can repel, they shatter.”
“What do spell frames do?” he asked, frustrated. “If everything is one-to-one, aren’t they pointless?”
“They let you draw in large amounts of ambient magic efficiently. That’s why you can’t use weaker spell frames for stronger spells. If you had enough magic in your body to blow up an army, then the world would burn down every time someone died. You jumpstart a spell using your magic, but rely on the magic of the world around you for the big stuff. That’s why magical dead zones can exist.” Maura grinned. “Heh. Not so dumb now, am I?”
Nathan scowled in response, but he had to admit that her explanation made sense.
Very little was known about spell frames and how magic was used in general. Nathan wasn’t much of a mage, but he knew that a lot of knowledge had come from Omria herself. If Maura knew this much, it suggested that the goddess had withheld a lot of information. But why?
Because now that Nathan knew this, it changed the entire way he approached using magic. It explained why using leylines made it so much easier and faster to cast spells, and why empowering spells with the binding stones was so effective. If there was a way to replicate this for other mages, the world could be changed overnight.
“How does this apply to ascended magic?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Ascended magic alters the world itself and has its own rules. If you’re distorting space or creating a pocket dimension, it’s kind of hard to talk about kinetic energy and shit. But it does run on the same magic, which is why you can use spell frames for it. You don’t need to, though,” she said.
“I tried not using them, but I find it a lot easier with them.”
“Suit yourself.” Maura shrugged. “Anyway, just think of ascended magic as super magic. You can technically do anything it does with the natural elements, but the magic requirements are way higher. I can wave my hand and remove stuff from existence. The amount of magic you’d need to permanently create a grain of sand with the natural elements is enough to vaporize a city.”
“Let’s not do that,” Nathan said.
“Boring,” she chirped, then smirked. “Because it’s time to talk about the mental stuff. Your body is full of magic, right? Well, so is your mind. It’s a separate thing, which is why you can enter it with magic. Mental tethers are magical connections as well—they’re basically mini-leylines, purpose built to carry magic for you.”
Was that why Nathan felt such an overwhelming presence in his mind whenever he went to dive into his binding stones? He had always wondered about that.
More to the point, he asked, “Are mental defenses magical as well? I never used mental magic before.”
“Oh no, you did. You just didn’t realize it. Whoever trained you Bastions did a great job teaching you just enough to do your jobs, but not enough to be too dangerous,” she said. “Your mind makes up everything you are. Your thoughts, desires, emotions, memories. Change those, and you change the person. That’s why mental magic is so cool.”
The wicked grin on Maura’s face was a reminder not to trust her. Anyone who could say how important one’s sense of self was, then say it was cool to be able to change it, was someone to be very wary around.
“Bastions do a great job of harming their Champions,” Nathan said coldly. “I’d say they know plenty to be dangerous.”
Maura rolled her eyes. “That’s just incompetence. The mind is super fragile. It’s like…” She looked around for something then huffed. “Imagine you have a really small balloon. Okay? Now you take a really big jug and keep pouring water into it. What happens to the balloon?”
“It breaks?”
“Yup. And that’s what you dumbass Bastions do to your Champions when you fuck around in their heads too much. Mental magic is all about not frying your target because your dick was too big for the hole you put it in. I mean, there’s also the passive stuff, but I don’t know how to teach you that. For us succubi, we have a third eye that lets us see mental stuff. We see your emotions and surface thoughts as little glowing pop-ups next to your head.”
That creeped Nathan out. Even with all of his mental wards, he had no way to stop something he fundamentally didn’t understand.
For now, he focused on the mental magic training being offered.
“Can you teach me how to safely traverse minds? I don’t want to control them, or manipulate them. I just need to better understand them,” he said.
“I mean, the techniques aren’t much different,” Maura answered. “You need ways to slip past mental defenses, to sever tethers, to forcibly calm minds, and to penetrate other mental magic. I think it’s time for some hands-on training.”
Hours later, he regretted accepting her offer. His brain hurt. For many reasons.
The Twins were a headache by themselves. But the actual practice physically harmed him.
As he suspected, they had held back earlier. Maura’s lessons left his mind feeling bruised. His thoughts felt sluggish.
Nathan realized how dangerous the current situation was. At any moment, the Twins could attack him. They had the ability to overwhelm his tired mind. Learning from them had been a mistake.
“Holy shit, you are the most paranoid fucking dude I’ve ever met. I can’t imagine what the wards around your mental core are like,” Maura said. Her sister had fallen asleep long ago out of boredom, as she wanted nothing to do with teaching. “No wonder your wards are so fucking strong. I bet you hear a strange sound while walking alone and you immediately consider fifty things it could be, and how you’d respond to each of them.
“Not really,” he said. “Because the response to most things I’d encounter on a walk alone in my castle is probably a friendly wave.”
She ignored his jibe and leaned back in her chair. The sun had set in this strange world of theirs, and unfamiliar stars were drawn in chalk on the black sky.
“Look, mental magic is driven by your emotional state. The same goes for all ascended magic, but this stuff even more so,” she explained. “If you want to control others, you need to desire to control them. If you want them begging and pa
nting, well, you need to be a slut.”
At least she was self-aware.
“All ascended magic?” he asked, repeating her earlier point.
“That’s what I’m told.” Maura shrugged. “I’m not great at this stuff. Like, fucked if I know how opening a hole between dimensions has anything to do with your emotions or shit.”
They fell silent for a while.
Eventually, Nathan decided to simply ask Maura something, “Does the appearance of somebody’s mental world tell you something about them?”
“Well, duh. Yours is like a fortress. Lots of layers and traps, and then you attack us if we slip through.” Maura pressed her hands together like a vice. “But you’re also aware of mental magic, which means you’re reshaping your mental world. Normal folks aren’t usually that different. Even Bastions and powerful mages tend to have pretty similar minds once you get past their exterior defenses.”
Alarm bells went off in Nathan’s mind.
“So, if two of my Champions appeared to be able to deceive me when I was inside their heads…” he began to ask.
“Yeah, there’s something up there.” She grinned at him. “I can help you with that, you know. Take a look myself. All you have to do is let me. A single tether to your mind. Not even as strong as Kadria’s.”
He gulped. “I’ll think about it.”
“Heh. You seriously meant it that time.” Maura sighed. “Fine, whatever. You’re cute, so I’ll give you this for free. What’s up with them?”
“One floods me with lewd thoughts when I’m inside her—”
“No wonder. You’re inside her.” Maura winked. “Next time, don’t stick your dick in her while visiting her mind.”
He ignored her jab, and explained Fyre’s problem, “The other feels fake. I felt like her mind was a huge trap, or a diorama. Even when I transferred control of her gems to me, something felt off. That’s why I wanted better mental magic. So I could investigate if a succubus was behind her.”
“Huh. Yeah, that’s weird.” Maura stared at a wall. “I’d say that’s paranoia, but… I wouldn’t worry about the first one. That’s a fairly basic mental defense. Child’s play once you practice a little. Don’t be like the little goat, who never bothered to learn and just reads surface thoughts and emotions.”
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