Chapter 52. Fire

  I was alone in the room and in my small cell. Henry, Arthur and the others must be logged out. Maybe they had given up completely. I didn’t know. But I needed some time anyway before I was ready to speak with them.

  I peered through my bars, inspecting the device that held us captive. The Hex of Exhaustion. It looked like a totem. A cylindrical wooden sculpture with a menacing face. Purple rings emerged from the bottom, spreading outward like ripples of dark energy. This has to be the thing that was draining our mana and stamina.

  On top of the totem, a gem pulsed with a purple light.

  From what I had learned about enchanting and engineering within the game, I knew that every device needed a power source. Just like the enchantments on my gear or the generator in Clarity’s room. That little gem was like a battery. The other thing I had learned was that magical devices could interact with each other. Back in the Dancing Cougar, the bartender had activated a tool that dampened the sound so that we could have a conversation. If my theory was correct, I might be able to create an artifact that could eliminate, or at least reduce the aura in the room.

  Of course, I had no idea how to do that. And the small clue that I had to get started was a long shot. Somewhere within the book that Bill had given me was a clue. A pattern for the type of device I wanted to make. Somewhere. Within five hundred pages of engineering language.

  Before I got started with my research, I needed to make sure that I could actually create a device. I had wire in my inventory, and Dread had explained how to make Enchanted Wire. I needed to heat it up until it was red hot, then sprinkle magic dust on top. Great. No problem. But I didn't have a fire spell yet or any mana.

  Back before our fated dungeon run, I had planned on giving myself a fire spell. I had never created a spell from scratch though, so the plan was purely theoretical. It was time to test that theory.

  I opened up my Spell Book to a blank page and set it down in my cage. The simple action exhausted me, and it took me several seconds to catch my breath. I lifted both hands, palms up and said Ignis while wiggling my fingers. Nothing happened. I had done the research on the ASL and the Latin, but the math wasn’t there.

  I caught my breath, then tried again. This time guessing at the math. Most spells were some multiplier of my Intelligence statistic. I started with a one-to-one ratio representing instant damage. I waited for my breath then shouted Ignis .

  “What are you doing?” Arthur startled me.

  My heart pounded from the surprise, and I nearly passed out. My instinct was to tell him to screw off, but I stopped myself. After a few moments I answered him. “Trying… to teach myself a fire spell.”

  “Why?” He asked. “What’s the point?”

  “I need to… try something,” I said. “But… no promises.”

  “Uh huh,” Arthur said.

  I checked my Spell Book. I had made progress. The diagram showing the finger movements had materialized on the page. At least that part was correct. But the small victory was actually a huge one. It meant that the process was possible. I checked the time. It was 3 am. The developers would shut the dungeon down in 23 hours. But I couldn’t dwell on that; it would only distract me. I needed to get done what I could.

  Over the next hour, I tried a dozen combinations of words, math, and finger movements. I suspected that many fire spells existed. I just needed to guess one of them. I tried Firestorm, Ignite, Fire Wall, Small Fire, Large Fire, and Fireball. Every video game spell I could think of. As I did, my Spell Book filled with new pages, one for each that actually existed.

  The tricky part was figuring out the right combination of words, movement, and math. But I was determined and systematic.

  Arthur chuckled at me and mocked me through the process. He shook his head and rolled his eyes. I know this because he actually said the words: “I’m rolling my eyes at you right now.”

  Eventually, I had to get lucky. My pages filled up, part by part. The Spell Book page for Firestorm had both hand movements and words. My breakthrough came after I had tried every spell with my Intelligence as spell damage over eight seconds. I was about to try Wisdom in the spell damage formula when I had a thought. What if fire does more damage than anything else?

  I tried plain old Fire as double my Intelligence over eight seconds. I shouted the word and wiggled the digits.

  A flame erupted in front of me in my cage.

  Congratulations, you learned the spell Fire from your Integrator passive.

  Fire: engulf your target in flames doing 2*I damage over 8 seconds. Cost: 25 mana.

  I screamed in some mixture of delight and surprise.

  “What the hell?” Arthur asked.

  I smiled, then raised my hands into the air the way a real fire mage would.

  The fire went out.

  “How did you do that?” he asked.

  “Arthur, can you contact Rowan and Cassandra? Like do you have their emails or some guild chat outside of the game?”

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  “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

  “I’d like to tell everyone all at once,” I said. “Will you get them to log in?”

  “Can you get us out of here?” he asked.

  “Still no promises, but maybe,” I said.

  “Okay. I’m logging out. I’ll be back after I contact them.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Before they come back. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for betraying you. I’m sorry for not asking if you wanted to join my alternative quest. I had excuses, but they’re stupid. I was an asshole. It was my fault.”

  He tilted his head to the side. “Okay…” he let the word trail off. “I need to think about that.”

  I nodded.

  After Arthur logged out, I pulled out my wire and disenchanted the dagger that I had used to cut my palm open.

  You received 1 Shining Dust.

  The dust was rare in quality. Hopefully that would work.

  I set the wire down in front of me, then casted Fire on it. Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. Of course, I had zero mana. Yet I had casted a spell. I had created fire moments earlier. Maybe it was because the discovery allowed a free cast?

  If I was right, I needed to discover another fire spell. I began experimenting again, this time with new knowledge. After seven attempts, I succeeded. Augue , I whispered. A sphere of fire erupted from my hands, exploding just feet from me inside my cell. The heat was overwhelming. It burned my face and body.

  Congratulations, you learned the spell Fireball from your Integrator passive.

  You received 32 fire damage. You will take 32 fire damage over 4 seconds.

  I gasped and screamed. I felt light headed. But the wire that I had set down glowed a dark orange color. I reached out, using what little energy I could, and sprinkled the entire handful of Shining Dust on the wire.

  It glowed brightly and then dimmed. What remained was metal that twinkled like it had tiny stars in it.

  You created Shining Enchanted Wire.

  I smiled, and breathed out a sigh. I reached up to check my body for burns. Thankfully, my armor had protected me from most of the heat. I rubbed my hands over my face. My skin felt tender. Still warm. A little crispy. Something crumbled on my fingers. I looked at them. Ash. I had singed my eyebrows. I reached up and rubbed the burnt hair off of my brow. A surprising amount of it. Oh well. I had Enchanted Wire. That’s what mattered.

  I pulled the book that Bill had given me from my inventory with reluctance. The last time I browsed its pages, it was so overwhelming that I had given up. I decided to start at the beginning. I read the forward, the table of contents. I flipped to a key of symbols within the book. The process of decoding began.

  Over the next two hours, I studied. Slowly. Methodically. Back in high school, I was pretty good at science. I enjoyed theoretical work like math and chemistry. I had built basic circuits in physics class, connecting batteries to light bulbs. But engineering manuals on circuits were a whole different ball game.

  Thankfully, The Joy of Mana Circuits started simply. When an author really knew what they were talking about, they were able to remove a lot of the complexity by explaining things at their core. Bill was such an instructor. I learned the symbols for capacitors and transistors. The difference between types of circuits. The math behind all of it was too complicated, even for me. What confused me most was the amount of power that a battery could provide. My enchantments, for example, had fifty uses before they needed to be redone. That little bit of enchanting thread on my bracers provided forty-eight battles worth of increased critical strike chance. The thread was a power source, a battery. But the manager of the Dancing Cougar had told me that their amplifier had to be replaced almost every day. According to Bill’s book, an actual power core should have a hundred times more battery power than a tiny piece of thread. It didn’t make sense.

  I logged off for an hour. I watched tutorials on the internet of basic circuitry. I cross-referenced the ideas from Bill’s book to the real world. And the ideas started to come together. The symbols in Integration Online were different from those on Earth, but not much. Integration Online used glyphs instead of circuit boards. A glyph was nothing more than a shape that represented an idea. If you shaped a piece of wire to represent Light, it would produce light until its power died. If you formed it in the shape of Heat, it would produce heat. That was it. And those shapes were reproduced again and again within Bill’s book.

  Eventually, I found what I thought I was looking for.

  “Warren?” Rowan’s voice interrupted my thought process.

  I had been thinking about what I would say, off and on, for almost an hour. Running it through my head over and over again.

  I looked up. Rowan, Cassandra, Arthur, Thomas, and Christian had all logged in. They each sat in their own cells, distributed in a circular fashion around the room. They looked at me from the floors of their cells, struck by the same hex that kept me from being able to move more than a few inches at a time.

  “Alright Warren,” Arthur said. “I gathered the whole group. Why are we here?”

  The moment had come. I wiped my hands on my vest. This must be how musicians must feel before a concert. Everyone watched me.