The Girl Who Hacked The Magic System
Chapter 113 - A fresh look at magic

Chapter 113: Chapter 113 - A fresh look at magic

The following days at school were very peaceful. Mom was right on her money. The Principal doesn’t have the guts to confront the royal family.

He settled down with just a verbal admonishment about the proper conduct expected from a princess. That’s fine with me.

I also let myself be more silent during class, being less confrontational with my teachers. It’s good to lay low for a bit, to wait for the attention to be turned elsewhere.

So I focus on my studies and my practices.

I’ve been coming up with several new arias lately, but I can’t simply test them anywhere. After all, I’m still playing the part of an average student.

Well, not that average. I’m still seen as the strongest in class, in both magic and swordplay, and I also have the best scores on all exams, except for history.

The last one is because the teacher gave me negative points for my opinions on the beastkin. That bastard.

So yeah, not your average student. But still only your average ’best in class’ student. The only arias everyone saw me cast were fire-based and with loud chanting.

So I can’t simply head down to the training grounds and test my new gravitational and spatial spells, right?

Though I now have mastered the gravitational powers enough to have a finer manipulation of gravity, enough to allow for telekinesis to work.

I can move objects around by messing with the gravitational forces applied to them, and I can make them as slow or as fast as I want to.

Pretty useful for when I want a certain book but don’t want to get out of my chair.

Space has been trickier, because messing with the fabric of space directly has unexpected side effects.

One that was only half-unexpected is that it also messes with time. It looks like you can’t really tear space and time apart even in this world.

The other one is that the space is not continuous, though it isn’t discrete either. It’s more like a haphazardly put-up ball of thread.

Things in space are clumped together like strands of thread, without regard to how close or far apart they are.

You pull a strand here, and something two floors above me crashes down. And I still lack the finesse to separate those strands and see where they go.

I still don’t know the rules for those links between different points in space. And sadly, there aren’t any clues within the books I’ve read.

Though they might end up being the basis for teleportation and portal magic. It’s just that there is so much that I don’t know about it, and it’s at a point where Earth’s knowledge won’t help.

To think that I would reach a point in physics research through magic that is more advanced than Earth’s physics research. Someone, please, give me a Nobel prize.

In any case, I can’t experiment much with it from inside my room. Some girls are already saying that the dorms are haunted, and I’m pretty sure that all the stuff they tell was caused by me messing up.

If I only had a way to ’see’ those strands directly, it would be easier. But, as it is right now, most I can do is just poke around blindly.

There are also two other fields where I have started working with. My secondary elements, of course, radiance and vacuum.

I finally got the green light from Mom.

The vacuum element is very straightforward. I can literally empty a space out of stuff, creating a literal pocket of vacuum inside it.

There are limitations, of course. The flesh of living things has a far higher resistance against it than inanimate objects. And intelligent beings have it even higher than common animals.

Oh, yeah, I know that because I actually used it in a mock battle with both my mothers. Lovelace was with us, as she always is when we are testing more potentially harmful magic.

Lovelace can heal absolutely anything, as long as the person is still alive, after all. And Lillian and Levinna aren’t the type of girls to shy away from the dangers of combat.

In any case, even when the vacuum pocket doesn’t form properly because of the resistance of flesh, it still hurts a lot.

And then there is the side effect. When a pocket of vacuum is formed anywhere, it tends to be filled very quickly with the matter that surrounds it.

And that’s where the danger to the caster itself lies. Depending on the place, size, and purity of the vacuum pocket, the wind that follows it might suck the caster or allies.

That’s the main reason my mother did not allow me to use it for the first years of my magic training. It’s a magic too dangerous for a child to wield.

Even today, I won’t even dream of casting it inside my room. It would destroy everything in it.

And then we come to the other element I have high compatibility with and haven’t used before. Radiance. Or, using Earth terms, radioactivity.

Yeah, that’s right. With that element I can recreate a literal atomic bomb.

Not only that, I can modulate it to be just the fallout over an area whose size I control. Or even to affect one single person with radioactivity poisoning.

It’s small wonder that Lillian told me to not even try to use it. It’s scary. I am basically a Walking Nuclear Power. I am mutual assured destruction in human form.

I obviously didn’t try to cast it even in mock battles with Lovelace present. The danger of atomic meddling is too strong in my mind for me to be comfortable with it.

But I still researched and memorized some arias that use it, just in case. I hope I never need to use that power, but if I have it, I should at least make it so it can be useful in an all-or-nothing situation.

In case, I don’t know, a Demon Lord from the Abyss appears or something. Or if I’m thrown out of this world to a weird dimension full of overpowerful monsters.

Anyway, I learned that I can also use the element to do the reverse thing. I can cleanse anything that was poisoned with radioactivity.

I haven’t found any case I could apply that knowledge to, but I have it. With the powers I have right now, I could even cleanse the whole regions of Chernobyl and Fukushima if I were on Earth.

And now I reached a point where I became the image of the mage in RPG campaigns that every morning takes their grimoire and memorizes their spells for the day.

And that’s not because there is a ’spell slot’ system, but because you need to ’chant’ (even if inside your head) the aria without any error for it to have effect.

And when you know so many arias and magic words and concepts and whatnot, it’s too easy to forget or misplace a syllable or word.

The augmented memory brought by the system surely helps a lot, but if I don’t keep practicing over and over again, I might discover in the worst possible moment that I don’t remember if that aria had a -ty or a -te form on the second verb.

And trust me, you don’t want to have to solve syntax issues in the middle of combat.