Magical Girl Quest - The Fire That Burns

"Karen." She tilts her head at your beckoning. "I need to go somewhere to get rid of all of this magic."

She nods, raising her voice a little from the distance. "I know a couple of places you can go." She looks back at the entrance and her shoulders droop a little. It doesn't occur to you until you reach her office, some of her trinkets are letting out horrible wailing noises while others just gave in completely and broke. You cringe, waiting for her comment, but she doesn't say anything. A few minutes pass as Karen does something, then you hear a knock on the door, Karen moving at a brisk pace to open it.

Samantha slowly steps through, eyes locked onto you as she makes her way over to Karen. They talk to each other quietly for a moment and you almost want to step closer and listen, before you remember why you were standing across the room from them. After an awkward minute or so, Samantha steps a little closer to you, lips pulled thin with effort. "Cerys, at the moment you have so much excess magic floating around that it is possible you could seriously hurt someone if they got too close." You blink in surprise. "I am going to lead you through the base, we are going to take a shortcut out of the city, you can discharge there."

You clear your throat and shift a little, the floor beneath your groaning in protest. That's probably bad... "Can you tell my sister where I'll be?" Karen nods at you.

"I've already sent Morgan a message, she'll know". You nod thankfully and follow Samantha as she steps through the door, the wood of the frame cracking as you brush past. You bow your head a little and try to ignore the muffled mixture of laughter and exasperation coming from behind you.

Your trip is made in silence, as best you can, with the building itself seeming to groan at your movements. You think about trying to start a conversation with Samantha, but whenever you catch a glimpse of her taught face, sweat beading on her forehead you step a little further back. She leads you deeper into the base, down a set of stairs made of solid stone and through an old dirt tunnel. Three lefts and a staircase up into solid rock later, you were standing in the middle of nowhere, the orange sky completely empty of the distant glow of a city.

Samantha immidiately steps away from you, practically running in her haste and dropping against a suspiciously placed fallen tree. You want to move closer and check on her, but her words come back to you sharply and you step back.

After a while, she props herself up on her knees, calling out to you. "I'm fine, I just need a while." Her voice is rough and strained, like she's been running a marathon or screaming. "This entire area was cleared just a few minutes ago, there isn't anyone within ten miles of here. Feel free to go wild."

You feel the air simmer as your heartbeat picks up, anticipation for the rush that using your magic in battle always brings. "It's fine if I just completely demolish this place?" You look around yourself, there are rusted metal shapes, some buildings, some not. But they all have moss and weeds growing on and in them. In the distance you see a tall fence, pristine chain-link peeking through the trees.

Samantha just nods, tiredly waving her arm behind her. "Keep it within the fence."

You turn back to the overgrown mess of metal and smile. The aura of magic that hangs around you pulsing in time with your heart, the sheer force of it weighing down on the world as you step forwards. You let it surge from you, releasing the restraints you'd had on the enormous mass of magic. There is a whoosh of displaced air and a spiderweb of cracks races outwards from you, crawling up walls and over flipped cars, your feet sinking into the ground slightly.

You let out a tiny breathless giggle, heart racing as you raise a hand. Your armour slowly forms, starting from your fingertips, spreading along your body. When it's finished, you heft your sword, pointing it forwards and taking a deep breath.

Ripples of blue light run along your weapon, your surroundings crumbling as you bring as much magic to bear as you can at once. Your sword is heavy, lines running from it and along your body glowing a harsh blue as they spread further and further, the rush dragging a wild smile across your face.

You lift your sword, pointing slightly upwards, you'd learned your lesson about aiming for the ground. You feel something arc across your shoulders and fire.

(Juggernaut Wave: +32,000 Base Damage, +29 Dice, +96 Spell Boost, +480,000 OVERCHARGE = 512,125 Total Damage

Hazard Training Grounds: 83,526 - 512,215 = -428,689)

There is a brief moment of stillness before the world disappears. You manage to catch a brief glimpse of your spell, shooting forwards far faster than before, then it impacts the mangled mess of terrain in front of you. You keep your feet for barely a second, then the ground is gone and you are floating. You dash upwards blindly, mentally scrambling as the air screeches in your ears.

You break through the towering mass of dust below you, and the air settles for a moment, you have just a second to catch your breath before a shockwave hits you. It doesn't knock you from the air, but its enough to daze you, right in time for the return of the air. There is a sudden feeling of pulling as air rushes past you, the cloud of debris and smoke rushing past you, caught in the grip of this.

It barely last more than two seconds, when you are buffeted by a much gentler shockwave than before, the cloud of smoke sent drifting away from the centre.

You pant for breath as you stare down with wide eyes, you look around franticly, but in the evening orange light the rolling waves of dust look like fire. You reach down through the cloud with your sense, quickly finding Samantha, safely huddled away inside the endlessly short corridor you had walked through.

You let out a sigh of relief, slowly returning to the ground as the billowing cloud of debris floats away. It takes a minute before you can actually see what your spell did, but when you do...

There is nothing there, everything is just gone. Stretching for further than you can see, there is just a line of nothing, your spell had just plowed right through anything above ground. What was that shockwave then?

You take a shaky breath as the answer comes to you. The spell collapsing. It didn't even hit anything that stopped it, it just destabilised on its own. You sit down heavily, ground pressed almost completely flat beneath you. If I had aimed that downwards...

You slowly stand, walking towards where you can feel Samantha and pyring the floor hatch open. Everything behind you had been saved from the effects of the spell itself, but the after effects were more than enough to knock trees down, or squish a normal human. When the first thing you see is her face looking up at you, half way through taking the fourth step to the surface you let out a sigh of relief.

She doesn't say anything as she exits the hatch and you step aside, letting her see the long stretch of destruction you had driven through the land. When she finally takes all of this in, she nods to herself once, turning to you. "Never, ever, do that near me again." You nod slowly, staring past her. Apparently you had used enough magic that she wasn't practically choking by standing next to you, but she still looked uncomfortable. You take a few steps away and her face relaxes.

She looks at you and then the new highway you had paved through over ten miles of forest.

"Is it safe to stay here?"

She tilts her head sideways to look at you, her usual professional demeanour nowhere to be seen. "Haaaa, funny joke." You don't get the chance to protest your innocence, before she continues. "You aren't going to get into any trouble for doing this and the location itself is a restricted area, no-one should wander into it straight away." She gently rests a hand on her face and you think you see her repressing tears. "We are never going to be able to hide this, what the fuck excuse are we even going to use here..."

You feel a little bad for probably tripling her workload, but a question still bothers you. "Can I use it again then, for a few smaller tests?" The way she slowly turns to look at you is adorable. She looks like she wants to murder you with every fibre in her being, but it comes out as a cute pout.

She stares at you as you maintain eye contact, that was supposed to be important. Eventually she just throws her arms up and turns away from you. "Fine, what the fuck ever. What's a little more damage, this place is fucked anyway." She stops, staring into the distance before commenting. "You have an hour, two at most, after that we need to be gone."

You nod, quickly moving over the destroyed terrain and stopping a fair distance away from her. Ok, less fucking terrifying and more control this time. You take a quick breath, carefully grappling with you magic as you form the spell. It's hard, really hard, the spell just integrates whatever magic you leave near it. With all of the excess you have floating around, it's damn near impossible to actually tone down the input.

(Ignition Knight: 88 + 10 = 98)

You try reducing the output, rather than the input. It is incredibly hard to tweak and the first time you tried casting it, it just exploded, rather than forming a wave of some sort.

(Ignition Knight: 78 + 10 = 88)

In the end, you manage to reduce the output. It's wasteful, since it also drags along the magic not used, but it lets you at least cast it weaker. You kept at casting the weaker variants until you felt that you were actually using your own stores of magic rather than your excess.

You check and while you should be getting back, you want to try something really quickly. You marshal your magic, narrowing your eyes as you think about your sword.

(Ignition Knight: 92 + 10 = 102 Artificial Crit)

Swords bloom into existence all around you, rows upon rows upon rows. You breath tightly as you focus on holding them all up with magic, you can just about keep over a hundred in your grip, but you are focusing on it completely. When Samantha kicks a rock and you glance over, you slip, a row of swords clattering to the floor.

You let out a frustrated breath, ready to keep going, but a call from Samantha reminds you that you were on a time limit. You reluctantly follow her back through the tunnels, exiting into the base with much lighter steps. You can just about make out your previous footsteps, indentations in the floor and slight warping of doorways and walls when you passed them.

Samantha leads you back to your room, looking like she wants to say something, before aborting her plan. She just nods at you before turning to leave. You look away from her, pushing open the door and catching Una's tackle hug with a spin, setting her on your hip as she happily nuzzles into your side. She doesn't say anything when you make your way into the room, closing the door behind you, but Morgan looks up from a conversation with Cuifen and calls out to you with a smile.

You really haven't had much of a chance to talk to her lately have you? Well, no time like now. You walk over, leaning against the table as you shift Una over a little. She pre-empts you with her greeting. "Hey, everything better now?"

You nod as you use your free hand to take a sip of water. "Yes, I may have gone a bit overboard with using it up, but the excess is gone now."

She let out a little laugh as she writes something. "Oh I can't wait to see what you've done now, created any more landmarks?" A pout finds it way to your face and she laughs harder. "HAH, you did didn't you?" She nearly drops her pen when she is wracked with giggles. Una is steadfastly ignoring everything but squeezing herself as close to you as possible and Cuifen is looking kind of confused. All that is missing is... You turn your eyes to the sofa, Daiyu's sleeping form still lying where it had been when you'd left in the morning. Never mind.

You settle back into your seat as Morgan recovers, priming herself to start digging into what happened as you feel a smile cross your face, Cuifen's words coming back to you.

Yes, this is why I fight.

Time Progression Vote
[] Fluff (Day to day character interaction)
[] Daily (The current method)
[] Hyperspeed (Gotta go fast to the next event)