"Wait, what? Their personalities are bleeding over into yours? What does that mean?" Yanna asked, clearly confused about what Ryan just said.

  "It means exactly what it sounds like," he scratched the back of his head, staring at Jester as he was excitedly sitting in his domain, "It's the most noticeable with Jester, since his personality is by far the most 'extreme', but even with the others, I change a bit. But it's a good sign, so I'm not complaining too much."

  This time, Michael was the one confused. He also dealt with changes in emotions when he was overtaken by his own magic sometimes. It was why he cried so easily, and was unable to stop himself once he started. And to him, it was one of the worst parts of using magic, so Ryan's nonchalant perspective was just baffling, "That... sounds pretty bad, though, right?"

  "Well..." Ryan thought about it for a moment, "So, when I link with the spirits, I know what they sense, and I have a deeper understanding of them. If I understand their emotions better, that just means I can read their intentions that much more easily as well. Plus, it's a good sign for the skill's trajectory."

  "Uh... like, how it's going to change?" Yanna wondered, "How so?"

  "Well, every ten levels, skills change slightly, and the exact ways they change depends on how the user uses that particular skill," he explained, looking over at Michael, "If a hydromancer uses their 'Hydromancy' skill for only offense, sooner or later, they will get boosts for offensive spells. If they use it for defense, they'll get boost for defensive spells. As for me... If I had used my Spirit Link skill to just completely manipulate the spirits, it could be moving somewhere, where I can impose my will on them completely. But instead, I try to understand their intentions, and just direct them to make sure that their intentions link up well with me and the other spirits, at least in combat."

  "Gotcha, so that's why your skill is making the connection to the spirits stronger? That's pretty neat," Yanna rubbed the fur on her cheek in thought, "I never really thought about that, but... the way people's skills present themselves can show their personality, then?"

  "Not necessarily their personality, but I guess so, yeah."

  The minotaur thought about it for a moment, "You know, I've got this match coming up... do you think you could help me analyse the abilities of my opponent? Their tactics seem kind of random a lot of the time," she pointed out, clearly struggling to find the right words to even describe them, but Ryan just nodded his head without hesitation.

  "Of course! I would love to. Just come over here whenever you want, and we can figure it out together," Ryan grinned lightly, and Yanna laughed.

  "You know what? Sure, I'll do that. Speaking of, where's Modak right now? I'm not seeing him around here," she pointed out, looking over the crowd to see if she could spot her boyfriend, who was nowhere to be seen right now. Though, Silvia quickly had an answer.

  "I think he went upstairs to his room earlier with some people from the robotics club, they're probably nerding out again."

  An excited smile appeared on Yanna's face, "Ooh, I don't want to miss that! I love it when he starts rambling about things and discussing stuff with his nerd friends, he just gets so sexy when he's like that," she smiled, immediately getting on her way inside.

  Silvia and Ryan looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. Sexy? It was impressive, sure, but... sexy?

  "Yanna's really head over heels for him, huh?" Ryan pointed out, and Silvia nodded happily.

  "Yup! Almost as head over heels as I am for Fae," she said flirtatiously, leaning her head onto the changeling's shoulder. Fae's face quickly flushed with an explosion of colours that she wasn't able to hide, and seeing that, Silvia couldn't help herself either and decided to continue teasing her girlfriend.

  With a smile, Ryan turned his attention back to Kim, Macy, Mark, and Michael, "Anyway... I hope you guys enjoyed the show, it's not gonna happen again anytime soon."

  Michael looked up at Ryan and nervously said, "I think you... I-I think you looked pretty cool..."

  "Thanks, dude," Ryan smiled, and looked over at his other friends. Those three, who were part of the new faction that Ryan was trying to build up, were his subordinates in a practical organisational sense, and though he basically never held that over their head, in moments like this... he liked to leverage his position a little, even if wordlessly with just a smug grin.

  Kim grumbled loudly, "I hate to fucking admit it, but it was actually pretty impressive, especially knowing what you're usually like."

  "Yeah, for a clown you've got some pretty good moves," Macy pointed out with a blank expression, staring Ryan straight in the face. Mark just shrugged.

  "It was sick as hell. You look like a doofus though."

  Obviously, leveraging his position never worked.

  "You know, Kim, Macy, good job on those lines. Mark, you took it a little too far. I know I look sick as fuck, cause Silvia made this outfit, so," Ryan said smugly, and the elf, who was only listening in with one ear, turned her head toward the group, taking a break from smooching Fae, and immediately yelled.

  "You're gods-damned right! Everything I make is amazinggg!" she pointed out enthusiastically, and Fae looked at her girlfriend with a laugh and then turned to Ryan.

  "How much has she had to drink?"

  "Shockingly, not that much," Ryan pointed out.

  Silvia just laughed and threw her arms around Fae's neck, "I'm just drunk on you, baby~!"

  Fae smiled lightly, "I think we're gonna find a place to sit down for a bit."

  Ryan agreed, "That sounds like a very good idea."

  "Right, we should go look for Jasmin as well. She gets kind of crazy at parties," Kim pointed out as he looked at his phone, seemingly having gotten a text, "Urgh... You're not particularly attached to that small carpet in your guest bathroom, right?"

  "... If it seems salvageable, just throw it into the bathtub for now."

  "And if not?"

  "I don't know, man, just like... Whatever, just put it into the bathtub either way, I'll figure it out tomorrow," Ryan sighed, and Kim quickly nodded, patting his shoulder while walking past him together with Macy and Mark. And so, Ryan and Michael were left alone for a bit.

  "So, how've you been doing?" Ryan wondered.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  "Uhm... I've been okay. A little busy, with practice and everything... I took my GED and graduated from school early so that I could concentrate on magic and stuff," he explained, though he didn't exactly sound excited about it.

  Ryan smiled awkwardly. He definitely got that, there was a ton of pressure on Michael. His family wasn't exactly well off, so he felt like he had to take all the opportunities he was given to get ahead in life, and with how genuinely ridiculous his mana stat was, those opportunities were plentiful, "Yeah... some of the guys from our Awakened 'Generation' said the same thing. They're just getting really damn busy with stuff," Ryan explained.

  Some of them were here as well, those that Ryan had been chatting with more and more recently. He had never been a great texter, but with his increasing sociability stat, he just somehow got better at talking to people. They were trying to be lowkey, just for once ever since they awakened not having to deal with a lot of the stuff that newly awakened folk simply had to deal with.

  Awakened people were highly-sought after, because having an Awakened person on payroll could boost the prestige of any company, no matter their field. Of course, for some, that meant that they could just relax and didn't actually have to do a lot. This was the case especially in the past, but more and more, the expectation was for Awakened to carry as much weight as they possibly could, plus a few pounds more. Especially newly Awakened whose abilities were technically weren't that much better than those of others on paper.

  Ryan was just in a pretty unique position.

  "Just try to relax for the night, alright? Come on, want another beer?" he asked, and Michael slowly nodded the head.

  "Yeah, sure..." the hydromancer smiled, looking up above Ryan's head. He couldn't see it of course, and he couldn't even really sense it. With Michael's spirituality, sensing magic like that was absolutely impossible. Frankly, his spirituality was far, far worse than that of the average person. But Ryan... he wasn't even a spellcaster class, and he was able to manipulate his mana to that degree? Three entirely different thought-processes. No matter what he said, pushing it onto the fact that he did similar things with the spirits all the time, that wasn't something that just anyone could do, and Michael knew that better than most others.

  It made Michael feel... worthless.

  Sitting in his room, his legs crossed while passing around a small joint, Modak looked over at one of the people that Ryan had invited, who he had met at the party a couple months ago with all the other freshly Awakened folk. Apparently, they were a Magic Engineer, and were particularly interested in meeting Modak. He was pretty famous in these circles. An unawakened prodigy that invented a method to synthesize magic, and then quit the Magic Tower after the incompetence the tower showed at the Spirit Week expo in preventing the horrors of that day, resulting in him getting severely injured.

  And even so, he was apparently still working on these projects and was regularly posting updates online, asking for help from other engineers for particular issues that he found.

  "No man, what I'm saying is that you have to like, upgrade your capacitators to boost the control you have over the flow of mana through your circuitry. That would solve some of the inscription errors you're talking about," they pointed out, taking a sip of their drink, "If we're talking about magic, then precision is the most important thing."

  Modak sighed, shaking his head, "There's no crystal capacitators on the market right now that are sensitive enough for what I need. Plus, what I've been saying is that I don't think the issue is actually in the inscription, but a distortion that happens when I translate the inscribed wavelengths into auditory magical expressions," he said, hoping that his point was finally getting through.

  "But why would that make sense, aren't you just boosting the original signal pretty cleanly? At least that's what it looked like in the paper you published. That means that the issue would have to be in the initial inscription phase."

  "If we were talking about regular use-cases for mana, that might be the case. Usually, when mana is expressed or boosted for any purposes, it happens in a controlled, sectioned-off part in a machine, but that's not the case here. I have to take way more into account, like the existing frequency of ambient mana when it comes to that side of things, and then simply the natural distortions that can happen when you play audio off a speaker."

  "... Then just, like... get a better speaker?" the Magic Engineer pointed out, clearly not quite understanding the issue. Modak tilted his head backward and let out a sigh, looking over at one of his own friends from his university classes that was sitting next to him.

  "You get what I'm talking about, right?"

  "Uh..." she wasn't quite sure what to say, "I don't really get most of what you said, but I do know how annoying it can be to tune a speaker right."

  "Exactly. And I basically had to custom-make my own speakers, because a regular old speaker isn't equipped for magic," Modak pointed out, right as there was a knock on the door and someone came stepping inside.

  "I think I kind of agree, though, just get the right type of speaker, then," Yanna smiled, not moving her eyes away from Modak for even a second. The magic engineer sitting on the ground rolled their eyes. They knew who Yanna was.

  "Sorry, but we're kind of talking, engineer to engineer here? Could you not right now?"

  Though Modak was a bit taken aback and confused by that reaction from this random, extremely rude person, he stood up from his bed and, somewhat awkwardly, stumbled over to her, "Sorry about them. I'm really happy you could make it," he said, as Yanna leaned down slightly and gave Modak a kiss.

  "Of course, I've missed you so much," she replied as the two hugged for a moment.

  "How's practice been?"

  "Pretty good! I've got a new match coming up, so I've been in the midst of it. But Ryan suggested something pretty good to use as an excuse for me to come over more often," Yanna explained, already excited to tell him more, and a broad smile appeared on the orc's face.

  "Really? That's awesome," Modak turned around to everyone in the room, "Everyone, if you haven't met her yet, this is Yanna, my partner. I hope you don't mind of she joins."

  The magic engineer sitting on the ground, who clearly didn't know that Modak and Yanna were dating, sighed lightly and rolled their eyes, "Mhm, whatever."

  Completely ignoring them, while everyone else was greeting her properly, Modak and Yanna sat down on the bed and slightly cuddled up together, "Anyway... What did you mean with 'right type of speaker'?"

  The others looked at Yanna a bit confused and curious as well, when she quickly explained, "You know. A combat speaker."

  "A... combat speaker?"

  "Yeah, I met someone that uses one just last week. I guess there's just one small company that produces them, but if you're an Awakened that uses bardic magic, but the style of music you play is something like rock or even metal, in this guy's case, it apparently comes in useful to have a speaker on hand. He has a skill that lets him boost his music through magic, but he uses that speaker to save on mana in the middle of a league battle. Other bardic mages don't need to worry that much about that, and design their set around their mana capacity, but in the league, people tend to come up with pretty unique solutions," Yanna explained, quickly pulling out her phone, "Here, didn't I text you the link to the company's website sometime?"

  Modak looked at Yanna's screen confused, "Wait, what? You did? I had no idea that was a thing..."

  Yanna quickly found the text where she sent Modak the link, though it had apparently gotten lost in the pool of messages. Almost immediately after sending that link, Yanna learned of her next opponent and was excitedly spam-texting Modak about that. So, she copied and resent the message.

  "That is actually so amazing, I should be able to contact this company and talk to them... Wait, they don't operate all that far away from here, that's like an hour away, tops," Modak looked through the company's website, almost wanting to send them an email already. He turned to Yanna and gave her another kiss as thanks for telling him about it.

  Though, something about that exchange seemed to have annoyed that magic engineer. With an angry groan, they got up, turned around, and just left the room, slamming the door behind them. The air was tense, and everyone was silent. Just the music on one of Modak's speakers was still running.

  "... What's their deal?" Yanna asked, and Modak shrugged.

  "I don't know, they've been getting more and more pissy all night. Maybe they just had a bit too much too drink?" he suggested, but didn't really know. But one of the other people in the room pointed at the bottle they were drinking out of.

  "I actually think they didn't drink, they came here by car. They didn't have anything to smoke either, not that I saw at least," she said, looking at the soda bottle that was standing on the ground.

  Modak raised his brow slightly, "Hm..." he looked at Yanna, "Did Ryan seem like he was noticing anything... off?"

  Yanna scoffed, shaking her head, "Nah, he was too busy clowning around outside. I think someone filmed it, I'll see if I can find it later. It was pretty crazy."

  Though Modak was pretty curious, he still felt a bit weird about something. Maybe it was just because he spent so much time around Ryan, and so much weird stuff happened when he got involved, but Modak got more sensitive to these things. And something was... off.

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