Nati

The air felt heavy from the accumulated static charges.

As Fenna's mother explained it through the magic crystal, the first offensive spell a wizard or a sorcerer learned was to cast lightning. It made sense: the components were already around us, easy to understand, quick to imagine, and convenient to control.

Even in my world, which knew nothing about magic, we used electricity for everything, making it hard to imagine life without it. Every kid learned about it in school, how electrons could jump from one atom to the next, and carry electric charges.

Every material was made up of such atoms, even the air, and as the molecules and particles moved around, bouncing against each other, they generated friction. Static electricity built up from the smallest breeze, although most of the time the opposite currents canceled each other out.

Especially if the air was damp since the water was a good conductor and the negative charges could easily jump across these molecules before they built up in large quantities.

However, when these discharges happened too quickly and violently, lightning bolts formed, followed by thunder. And with the aid of magicules, I gained perfect control over them. While the steps were still unclear to me, the crystal acted like a cheat item and enabled me to skip years' worth of training and focus on the creative part of casting.

No wonder all the village's magicians wanted it, or at least own a copy. Even the practiced witches learned a lot from this, making their spells faster, more efficient, and stronger. And if it enabled me to cast magic without proper learning, the shaman could do it too.

The need to concentrate with every brain cell on what I was doing never went away, but the staff made things easier. The images flashed up in my mind as usual, though I still only remembered less than half of them, and understood barely one percent with my conscious mind, but my brain knew how to handle them and move on to the next part of the process.

I knew how the charges worked, lightning formed, and all that needed to be done was give it a target, which the hellhound was kind enough to supply me with. Thanks to my concentration, time seemed to slow down, and tiny electric sparks emerged from the creature, jumping ten or fifteen feet at a time until the stepped leader reached my staff. Then the real magic happened.

Once the upward streamer and the stepped leader met, a powerful return stroke zipped across from the cherry branch to the abyssal dog. This was the real lightning, that the people usually observed. All the pent-up currents got released at once, and the air heated up hotter than the sun's surface. The superheated gasses quickly expanded, then lost their temperature and created the shockwave known as thunder.

By the time the echo of the crack returned to me, the monster evaporated. I needed to blink a few times to make sure it wasn't just in my mind, but the enemy was gone, and Emi's jaw dropped. Time returned to normal, but it was too early to celebrate with plenty more targets around.

"Way to go, Nati! Keep an eye out for the Cerberus." Omerta yelled, striking another creature with an attack just like mine. "These crystals and the staff are amazing. My spell feels stronger and I can even talk while casting it. This will be like a walk in the park."

"Not fair, look how poorly they burn..." Ember complained although the fireball she cast was enormous. I imagined, casting these was much more difficult than my simple lighting, and three dogs got engulfed in the flames. Only one emerged once the ball dissipated. "See? All of them should have been turned into dust. But I guess the staff does work."

"Girls, please focus." Gitaut didn't share their enthusiasm, but then he didn't get a staff or a crystal, and he mentioned something about the local spirits behaving strangely. Still, we had some fighters with us too, and they couldn't even get in on the action before all the hellhounds got destroyed.

"Piece of cake," Emi claimed, patting my back. That was my first battle where I didn't feel useless, but it ended so quickly and one-sided that it didn't seem right to call it that. "So where is that cereal?"

"Cerberus. It's a larger type of hellhound, and it has three heads." The shaman corrected her and pointed ahead. "I feel her presence in that direction. She seems to be casting some sort of barrier around herself."

"Her? It casts magic?" I asked surprised. "Is it their mother or something? And monsters can use spells too? Shouldn't we prevent that?"

"Yes and yes... Something is about to come..." Gitaut closed his eyes and reached forward with both arms. The earth shook and I couldn't tell if it was the shaman's doing, the Cerberus, or something else. The answer came sooner than I expected, and the huge monster made a terrifying entrance. It broke through a mostly intact building like it was nothing and released a gut-wrenching scream.

"What the hell was that?!" Emi yelled too, trying to block the sound with her palms. The hobs and the ogre scattered before the monster struck them down, but now it directly faced us in the second row.

"It's some kind of sonic attack!" Ember shouted, sending fire bolts towards the creature. They seemed ineffective, but at least the scream finally stopped. "Ugh, he is immune to my magic now."

"Yes, as I said, it cast a magic barrier... We need to fight it with physical means, but avoid those huge teeth and claws." Gomel claimed.

The monster was enormous. The hellhounds seemed not much larger than a grown wolf, maybe a deer, but their mother was the size of a smaller building. And having three heads and three mouths lined with enormous teeth didn't help to cope with it.

I couldn't see normally, but my soul's eye was open, detecting the magical aura that disrupted the mana flow. That's how it protected herself from our magic attacks.

But if she was immune to direct strikes all I needed was a roundabout way to attack. There was plenty of rubble thanks to her violent entry, and the gravity held them in place.

Even though it was a simple concept, people didn't normally think about it. Everything had a mass, and the larger it was, the bigger the force it exerted on the other objects around it. This mass had to be enormous to be detectable, like the size of a planet, but it was there in everything.

All it took was to make the object believe it floated in space instead of lying on the planet's surface, and it would lose its weight. And if I created a phantom mass above it, only existing for that one object, it would gravitate towards it, defying real physics.

This was impossible in my world, but thanks to magic, all I had to do was imagine it and use some kind of telekinesis. I just focused on the rubble and detached it from the real world's physics before applying mine.

In a few seconds, they flew into the air and I simply changed the direction of this phantom gravitational force. Adding the real mass of the planet for good measure, the rocks and bricks dove like asteroids, showering the monster with a deadly barrage.

It certainly felt that even if my attack wasn't enough to bring it down. But the barrier that prevented the witches' magic from penetrating finally dissipated. I couldn't tell if they felt it or wanted to follow up on my strike on a whim.

An icicle spear and a fire bolt hit the monster simultaneously, and the Cerberus cried out in agony. One of its eyes turned inside out, though it had five more before it became blind. She used his enormous front legs to counterattack, but it was stopped mid-air, thanks to Gitaut's barrier.

"Now, everyone attack!" Omerta gave the order, and the hobs poked the beast with their spears. The ogre rushed under its belly in an attempt to pierce its heart. The skin and bones turned out to be too thick for such a strike though, and he was nearly squashed beneath its other legs.

My mind lagged a bit, concentrating on each spell took a lot out of me, and I was still thinking about gravity, and phantom masses when I looked at the monster struggle. But then I thought, why not apply the same principle to that living being too? Now that its defenses were down, it must have been a fair game, to throw her around...

The phantom mass was still present so I just sent it up into the sky and attached it to the enormous monster. If all I did was to give the ogre some time to breathe, I already won. But my magic did much more than that. The Cerberus started floating, desperately clawing and biting at the air around itself, and then I slammed her against a sturdy building, bringing it down with her.

This gave me another idea: what if I moved the fake gravitational center inside the monster, and increased the mass as much as possible? Like a hundred times the mass of this planet, no, a thousand times what the star could weigh, or... how heavy was a black hole at the center of a galaxy?! My mind wouldn't stop coming up with wilder and wilder ideas.

And the Cerberus' body started to crumble.

The bones crackled and shattered with terrifying sounds, the creature shrinking until it reached a regular dog's size. The magnitude maybe, but not the shape. It was a grotesque mass of mangled meat, bones, and rotting skin, and I almost threw up.

As I lost focus and no longer concentrated on the phantom mass, it suddenly disappeared, and the Cerberus violently exploded. The bits and pieces scattered all around us, but thanks to Gitaut's magic barrier, none of us were covered in the visceral remains of the creature.

It was complete silence in the ruined city, and I felt like every eye was locked on me. I felt dizzy and had to lean on the staff to remain upright. Thanks to my mind wandering, I finally reached my limits.

Nobody said a thing, they just stared at me, and I didn't like those eyes. Even Emi seemed afraid of me for a moment, but then she rushed over for support when I lost my balance.

"Um... Sorry, I just... Uh, wanted to try something out." I stuttered and felt tired. "If you guys don't mind, I need a little rest..."

"Hmm, yeah, Nati, you do that." Omerta nodded, keeping her distance. Gitaut's green skin turned as white as snow too. Were they that scared? "And the rest of us... Let's just pretend, we didn't see that."