An Anti-Hero's Origin

Free Fall

^^ Rockwell's Tower Ruins ^^

Gates, as it turned out, were all about Math, and weren't that difficult to calculate, if you knew Spacial Mechanics, Quantum Theory, and Mathematics.

"Who'd have thought my Father's obsessive desire for me to be the smartest person in the entire Hall of Research would actually be useful? I don't imagine that he knew about the equations of Gate Spells, as Kip said they're top secret, and we're not allowed to explain it to anyone, which is why Conjuration Runes are so secret, as well..." I hummed, petting the lizard the size of a house-cat, Laplace, who had grown to that size in the past week with surprising speed. According to Kip, his explosive growth was not entirely unnatural, but could be at least partially attributed to my Mana and the large amount of Food I provided him; I summoned bugs for him nearly en masse, both as training for myself in summoning, but also to test the amount of control I had over what I summoned.

I learned that I could order swarms of flies and whatever else to fly into Laplace's mouth, but the moment he started chomping on them with his surprisingly sharp teeth, the control was broken; this implied that there was a contract that I 'signed' when I summoned them, and the terms of that contract required me to keep them from harm, which made little to no sense. Why would I Summon a Monster, -one of my only methods of defending myself besides my physical armaments,- if it turned on me the moment it was wounded? To combat this in Laplace, I had extracted a sample of his pheromone glands and carefully began the process of conditioning him towards total obedience to me; I thus went beyond the Magical Contract, and created a Biological Imperative, or instinct. Every time I fed him bugs, I also dosed him up with pheromones, and over the week I'd been doing this he was more and more obedient, not even requiring my Mana or food to obey me; though I still gave them to him because of the positive effects for my Mana Pool, which had grown to twice my old limits in just one week of hard work.

According to Kip, though the ratio equality was terrifying in the long-term, that percentage of increase was impressive, but not overtly abnormal; this proved that the ratio of increase was similar regardless of the starting point, meaning someone with 1% of my Mana would increase to 2% in the first week, then 5% in the first month, while mine would double, then quintuple by the end of the month. The end result, apparently, was that my Mana would eventually be somewhere close to 1000% of what I started with, or ten times as much; this would take something like ten years, due to the rate of diminishing returns, but that was nothing compared to a High-Elf's projected lifespan of eight hundred to a thousand years, so I was looking forward to whether or not I could actually improve beyond that, given said lifespan.

"If humans only live for about eighty to a hundred years, and from the age of thirteen or so to the age of twenty-five they multiply their Mana Pool by ten, but it doesn't increase from twenty-five to a hundred, that means that the diminishing return of Mana Gathering requires more than seventy-five years to increase beyond ten times; therefore, over the course of the nearly-a-thousand years of my standard lifespan, by that rate of decay, I can only increase a maximum of fifteen times my starting point. However, my Starting Point was eighty-percent of the Mana Sea of an ArchMage, and thus even in the next ten years, I'll have four times the amount of Mana that my parents have, combined! Isn't that amazing, Laplace?" I asked the lizard, who snorted a burst of fire off to our right as I addressed him.

To the south, that Ruins caught my eye again, as they had every day since I'd come here. One tower, surrounded by a city that was destroyed and left to rot, even after the monsters were gone. According to Kip, It was called Rockwell's Tower, and it had been the Dominion of an ArchMage of Conjuration before a Dragon rolled in and tore most everything down; then a pride of Manticores took over the ruins for a time, before moving on to greener pastures, and after that it was dire wolves, so on and so forth. Still, even without a pride of monsters inside the city, the trip there was straight through the potentially lethal Wild Lands. Luckily for me, I was a Conjuration Mage, which meant I could Gate right there, once I calculated Distance and Angle to land properly on Top of the Tower. I didn't want to land in the city, because it was possible it wasn't empty of monsters, so landing on the roof was my best bet.