Book 4. Chapter 18
The trip to Prinnash was mostly peaceful and uneventful, even compared to the last couple months he’d spent in Blackcliff. Without a workshop or even enough space to get a good workout, he’d been forced to concentrate solely on his illusions. He spent most of his days sitting on the deck watching the movement of the ocean while threads and split minds worked on his magic, often summoning different shapes and colors inside his and Sion's cabin when it was empty.
He worked on his battle programs, mainly creating and integrating new strategies based off the new data he’d gotten from facing Zilly and Davi. That always gave him mixed emotions; he didn’t want to see anything good about the way they’d gone about their boneheaded send-off, but he already had a hundred ideas of things he could’ve done better and new spells he could try.
A lot of his time was spent in refining the spells he already had. He could summon his mirror men even faster now, as well as make them walk and move naturally.
Perhaps the most exciting development was the core of the Fire Jelly. He found he could pump truly extraordinary amounts of light magic into it and then release it all at once. He could store his entire Mana pool and then focus it all into heat, giving him a viable heat attack for the first time. Using the Language, he’d kind of been able to transform that light magic into a laser, but it had lost so much energy in the process that he’d barely been able to use it to light dry kindling on fire.
The breakthrough had come when on a port day he found a [Gemsmith] who could reshape the core into a cylinder that would fit into the laser he’d made. With the new core, the laser turned into a burning beam of light that could travel miles before dispersing in the atmosphere.
Better still, if he completely closed it off, he could pump the mirror with energy and then release it all at once, shooting a fairly powerful flame attack that moved at the literal speed of light.
If he really wanted to burn things, he could always make a big parabolic lens and hang it in the air, but those were hard to aim and weren’t really practical in a combat situation. The new laser was an ace in the hole.
Sion spent most of his time working in his room, but he always had time to chat or to play a board game when Brin went to see him. Rhun was restless to the point of being unbearably annoying. He challenged Brin to a duel at least once a day, and Brin complied about once a week. He beat the upstart [Warrior] every time.
For his part, Marksi spent most of his time in the ocean. It always made Brin’s heart leap to his throat when he saw the little dragon jump into the water, but Marksi was quick as a fish in the water. He took to making webs between his fingers and toes, and elongated his body again so that he could half swim and half wriggle through the water like an eel. He’d even started to move his eyes further to the sides of his head, but transformed back to normal after Sion told him it made him less handsome.