Chapter IV.II (4.2) - Dimensionalism Basics

  “You’ve made your decision?”

  Kizu’s spatial magic instructor, Wakino Yukiko, stoically stood in front of him. Stretches beneath her cloak hung loose, showing a lack of substance. Despite her hood concealing her face, he felt her stare. Though he never knew from where. It could be she watched him from beneath the hood, but just as easily, her eye could be hidden away on the other side of the room. Pieces of her were scattered throughout space.

  “You gave me a few options. Work on strengthening my barriers, telekinesis, banishment, or dimensionalism.”

  Wikino nodded. She motioned for him to continue.

  “Well…I’ve given it some thought. They all sound incredibly useful and versatile. Honestly, I want them all. But if I have to choose one…dimensionalism is what I really gravitate towards.”

  The spatial mage stood completely still for a few seconds. Kizu glanced around the courtyard they used for training, worried that maybe he’d said something wrong. Then she waved a hand and a thick tome appeared in her palm. Her severed hand then separated from her main body and dropped the tome in his arms.

  “Very well. This is the subject I believe you’re least suited for at your current level. To better understand the nuances of the branch, read this and report back to me tomorrow.”

  “Which chapters?”

  “All of it.”

  Kizu’s heart sank. There must be over a thousand pages currently resting in his arms. “By…tomorrow?”

  “Yes. This branch of magic is deadly and requires true commitment. Prove that commitment to me. I will question you on the contents when we meet tomorrow.”

  Kizu took a deep breath and nodded his ascent.

  Wakino said nothing else. A split second later, she jumped from the courtyard. Leaving Kizu alone with his new study material.

  “I knew it was a trick,” he muttered. “She’s definitely punishing me for not choosing barrier practice.”

  Rather than cross the palace to the library where he was likely to encounter nobility who’d try to interrogate him for information or drama with Princess Kiiroi, Kizu simply sat down in the grass and turned to the first page and began his extremely long study session.

  The unnamed author of the untitled tome clearly felt passionately about the subject of dimensionalism. The entire book was handwritten and Kizu was relieved to see every couple pages there was a page of diagrams and sketches to help illustrate points. Those were pages that didn’t require studious minutes of reading.

  He checked in periodically on Mort while he studied. The monkey was perched on the top shelf of a slightly ajar closet. Earlier, Kizu had instructed his familiar to supervise Anata and the Kitsune children. While the nocturnal monkey loathed being awake in the day, he did still keep an eye on them while they sat on the room’s floor, playing a board game.

  Or, at least, Kizu first thought it was some board game. After half a dozen check in’s, he realized that Anata and Mae had stolen Ione’s bestiary cards and were playing with them.

  “The blood cost for that one is too much!” Mae protested as Anata placed a card that featured a multi-headed bear in front of her. “We agreed earlier on the limits! If you use that, you pass out and I’ll win.”

  Anata considered before withdrawing the card. Then she took two different cards from her hand and placed them on the floor. Mae squealed in frustration but Kizu pulled himself back from Mort before he heard the girl’s new complaints.

  He’d go give the cards back to Ione later. It wasn’t pressing. There was no real risk of damage. Not with those two. Now if Kon had been playing with them, that would be something else entirely. He was more likely to eat them than read them. But the Kitsune boy had been curled up in his fox form in the sun over next to the window.

  Even if Kizu did rush back to the room, he wouldn’t be able to return the cards to Ione until after dinner anyway. The summoner had been whisked away by Aoi earlier. They were returning to the Hon Basin to meet with Hone, the necromancer, to try to appeal to him to join the court as Emperor Sasaki’s Royal Necromancer.

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  Kizu couldn’t join them. Not after reneging on his promise to the Hon Basin witch coven. They’d be out for vengeance after he failed to deliver their former apprentices to them. Instead, Mitsuko was their dedicated guide in the jungle. While not a mage herself, she knew the territory and dangers almost as well as Kizu.

  He hadn’t seen as much of the villager in the recent days. He had expected her to latch onto him after their arrival, but instead, Emperor Sasaki decided to adopt her into his small group of advisors. And she adapted to the new setting surprisingly quickly. It was one less thing for Kizu to worry about, so he was more than happy for her.

  Refocusing on his studies, Kizu reread the page his eyes had just glossed over. It was conceptual theory about space and its existence in the material world. There was a footnote at the bottom about astral projection used by high level diviners. The soul defied the material world when not tied into a mortal vessel. That, in turn, caused dimensionalism in specific scenarios to have bizarre side effects like a single soul taking up disproportionate amounts of space in a dimensionally altered area. There were ways in which to fix this perception and calibrate it, but they required further layers of spellcraft.

  “Interesting,” Kizu muttered. There wasn’t anything else on that particular subject, instead it referenced a book on divination and an enchanting guide. But just that footnote gave him an idea. He set the book to the side and clapped his hands together. As he slowly separated them, he stretched the space between his fingertips. He released the spell and felt the whoosh of air as space readjusted to fill the void. On one side of the courtyard, a single bamboo tree snapped while on the other end, a stone ejected out from a pile. The rock garden collapsed, tumbling in on itself after the stone’s removal.

  Kizu leaned back to avoid the stone as it fell in the grass beside him. He’d stretched space with dimensionalism before, but that hadn’t been his goal there.

  He picked up the stone and tossed it in the air. And caught it. He was on the cusp of something new. Tossing the stone in the air, he tried the opposite of what he’d done before. The stone zipped back to his hand with tremendous speed. He yelped and dropped it as it slammed into his palm. Not what he’d been attempting either.

  One more attempt. He tossed the stone up and focused. Not on the space between his hand and stone, but rather his own body. The skin at the tips of his fingers. His fingernails. The blood. The muscles and tendons. He channeled a spell into that tiny bit of space, calling on his memories in astral projection and willing that same sensation. And this time, instead of catching the stone, it passed right through the tips of his fingers.

  He successfully phased through the rock.

  Kizu laughed. This was not what Wakino had intended for this book to teach him, and that made the spell’s discovery even more rich and delightful.

  Over the next few minutes, he experimented further with the phase spell, but was dismayed to discover a severe drawback with it. He needed to fully understand what was phasing through. So while he could recreate the scenario with the tips of his fingers, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get past the top knuckles of his hand. And, after embedding the stone halfway through his palm on his fourth attempt, he decided to give it a rest.

  He yanked the stone out of his hand with a wince and pressed the cloth of his sleeve onto the exposed flesh.

  In an effort to distract himself from the pain, he turned his attention back to his dimensionalism tome.

  After another twenty minutes, he gave up. His throbbing hand was too distracting. He muttered to himself as he tucked the tome under his arm, ready to head off into the palace in search of someone to heal him.

  “You need help?”

  Kizu immediately turned at the soft voice, scanning the courtyard. Nobody. He flashed his spellsense, searching for anyone camouflaged or invisible. He saw only the usual enchantments. If someone was here, they were using divination to defy his spellsense.

  “Was that you?” he whispered. The voice of his soul’s stowaway was usually more masculine, but maybe something had happened to it.

  “Up,” the whisper said.

  Kizu looked up and met the scarlet eyes of an albino barn owl perched on the tops of a bamboo tree. His heart skipped a beat. He knew that familiar. He immediately layered himself in antimagic barriers, focusing the majority around his head.

  “That will fester if left unintended. I see its future.”

  “Fuku,” Kizu said. “Where are you? What are you doing here?”

  The lone surviving witch from the Death Party spoke through her familiar’s beak. She ignored the first question.

  “I came to check on Chiame.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Oh. Unfortunate. My divination led me to this palace.”

  “I…I don’t know why. I killed her in the World Dungeon.”

  He actually had a very strong suspicion of why. Though he lacked the ‘how’ to support his theory.

  “Her soul was active in the area hours ago. Perhaps she drank a potion to transform herself into a wraith or revenant on death,” Fuku mused. “She was a prodigy at soul altering concoctions. I will continue my search. Thank you for the information, Kaga Kizu.”

  The bird spread its wings.

  “Wait, why do you want to find her?”

  The owl paused and rotated its head to look back at him. It opened its beak and the mind mage answered.

  “She is a friend. Perhaps a poor one, but a friend nevertheless.”

  And with those final words, the owl took flight.

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