Mage Among Superheroes

Even if we took into account the minimum possible casting requirements for Gate due to upgrades, Midnight was still a long way off from being able to cast it alone. He would need more than a handful of levels to barely complete it- any less might not even finish creation of the portal, let alone give time to go through it. He was a full dozen levels behind me when considering being able to cast the spell at full power, and even then, casting a spell like that at the fatigue threshold made me uncomfortable about the spell being properly sustained.

Given a similar rate of advancement, it would only take him a couple years- but that wasn't actually sustainable. Unless we kept fighting stronger and stronger opponents to keep maintaining our growth, but that was likely to result in a battle going against us sooner rather than later. And depending on who we were up against, that could be the end of our career. Handface had obviously been trying to kill us. Doctor Doomsday probably would, if he considered us inconvenient. Gloom and Darkstargirl… well, one might want to kill us, and we would certainly suffer greatly if we lost to them.

But the point was, even though I liked fighting I knew we couldn't remain at our same rate of growth forever. We'd already sparred with most of the people in the Brigade a dozen times at least, and there was some limit to how much we could train with outsiders.

Not that I was disappointed in our growth. In slightly more than a year, I had gone from barely any experience to something expected of a proper experienced mage, it wasn't surprising if things would slow down a bit. And if it only took Midnight 2-3 years, that was significantly better from the 'expected' 5-10 years of adulthood studies to reach level 30. Combat experience was good for him as well- just not as much as for myself, who could only receive such experience.

But the point was that Midnight could still cast Gate as long as we worked together. He'd done it before, returning his people to Celmoth. We'd mainly had hesitations about being able to return as we couldn't guarantee the difficulty would be the same in both directions. That issue was less of a concern now, with my larger mana pool. I should be able to get us somewhere, even if we had to return home from another world.

It came to my attention that we hadn't attempted to open a Gate directly to Celmoth from Earth before. It had been from my old world. But I quashed that thought and didn't bring it up with Midnight, as he was just finished psyching himself up. It was one thing to send some people back home, and another to potentially return himself.

"I can do two thirds," Midnight said. "Leaving one third to you." I nodded. Managing a ratio like that would probably be best. I felt him begin gathering mana, and joined in, lending my power to his image.

Space itself expanded from a single point, the wall in front of us replaced by a previously seen view looking out of what was apparently a teleporter- I still hadn't seen them used, so I could only take his word for it. The Gate was a bit wobblier than before, but it was better than that one time we had made a portal to Mars.

"See, nothing to worry about," I said to Midnight. "Except for anything you might have forgotten about."

"Like what?" Midnight asked.

"I don't know, something about bringing someone through a portal at some point?"

The portal closed.

"... I haven't contacted my mother in over a week," Midnight said.

"I'd suggest the excuse that one of your friends was dying."

"That's true, though."

"You could have still snuck in 10 mana somewhere this week," I said. "It's still an excuse. Just a good one."

Midnight grumbled.

"So what do you think about the portal stability?" I asked.

"Good enough to bring someone through," Midnight admitted. "If they were waiting properly. But going through ourselves… still has issues."

"I felt some level of mana there," I said. "And we could definitely bring enough mana crystals to get back. But first you should probably fulfill that earlier promise."

-----

Even though she was quite eager to visit, there were still some steps we had to go through for Jet to visit Earth and she needed some time to be prepared. She had responsibilities and things which prevented her from just hopping between worlds whenever she wanted. Sounded like a pain.

But I had other things to work on anyway. Things like trying to find permanent portals between worlds using Scrying. Which hadn't been working great before everything with Handface, but a week of trying to deal with magical resistance and constantly casting the spell had resulted in another upgrade. Actually, there had been quite a few of those from various things.