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Princess has an action-packed day! After some preparation, the duo team up with the Captain of the Guard and a mercenary, and seek to deal with the growing threat of the Brotherhood of Shadows. There's action, there's fighting, but not a lot of fighting because all we found was a group of low-level mooks without the real boss. But hey, we got something! And Master got to show off a combat spell!
This one is a little heavier than most of the other chapters, reaching 7989 words or about 12.5 pages. I got to the fight scene and realized I was over my usual soft limit, but making it a cliffhanger would just have been evil. The next fight will probably be harder, too.
Princess has an action-packed day! After some preparation, the duo team up with the Captain of the Guard and a mercenary, and seek to deal with the growing threat of the Brotherhood of Shadows. There's action, there's fighting, but not a lot of fighting because all we found was a group of low-level mooks without the real boss. But hey, we got something! And Master got to show off a combat spell!
This one is a little heavier than most of the other chapters, reaching 7989 words or about 12.5 pages. I got to the fight scene and realized I was over my usual soft limit, but making it a cliffhanger would just have been evil. The next fight will probably be harder, too.
Category Story / All
Species Western Dragon
Gender Female
Size 120 x 120px
Listed in Folders
based on what ive read up to this chapter, im guessing that either: A) on Terra theres propaganda from the guild saying "selftaught" magic is dangerous in order to encourage guild membership, or B) selftaught magic IS dangerous and Tola just got lucky for some reason [perhaps hes The Chosen One lol]
Most self-taught mages don't get all that far. Learning magic is hard, after all, and the Guilds are the ones with all the books and professors and such. They're a lot less likely to actually cause serious issues, but enough do that the Guild doesn't need to put a lot of work into spreading the idea that You Can't Trust Non-Guild Mages.
Probably the bigger thing to worry about is con-men, claiming to have Secret Power that the Guild Doesn't Want You To Access, able to do far more and for far cheaper prices without all that stuffy bureaucracy and meddling getting in the way. Of course, such men can barely make some sparkles appear, enough to make you believe the problem lies elsewhere, and if you just cough up a few (dozen) more Sovereigns, surely they can buy the Really Good Materials from their Secret Connections and you'll get what you want. ^.~
And then, once in a long while, you get the crazy fool who does get their hands on a book at just the right level of "Too powerful for them to use safely" and "Not too powerful they can't understand it well enough to activate it at all", and you end up with someone exploding a fireball in their face in the middle of a library and burning down half the city. >.> Even worse if they've been using "shortcuts" to try to gain power quickly, like abusing powdered Dragon Scale to overload their reserves of power...
As for why Tola is so good at magic, well, that's an interesting question. Magic potential is mostly inherited: two powerful mages will usually have powerful children, and two magically-dead parents will usually have children who struggle to light a candle with all their might. But there's also enough randomness thrown in that you can't really predict it. Like, 80% chance it works normally. That isn't to say you can't succeed if you work at it, it's not a measure of "maximum potential", just "starting talent". The biggest factor in power is practice. The more you channel energy, the more you become able to channel.
Current books teach that the soul generates magical energy, and it's like any other muscle, you grow it through exercise but you can over-exert yourself and cause problems. Most "shortcuts" are like steroids, they might boost you in the short term but they'll do severe damage in the long term by pouring more energy through you than you're naturally generating, and in serious cases that can mean draining your soul to a dangerous extent. Dragon Scale, for instance, is linked to megalomania, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and an addiction to the rush of power because it makes you feel invincible. Users stop relying on their own soul to generate magic, taking more and more Scale, until the impurities and residue clinging to their soul causes them to sicken and damages their ability to use magic at all. Granted, most users end up doing something... ill-advised that gets them killed long before reaching that point. Like performing highly unethical experiments on captives, letting them escape, and failing to protect themselves from angry dragons because they didn't think they could possibly mess things up to such a degree... Ah, Elimaio, did your abuse of Scale get you kicked out of the Guild, or did it just cause you to get yourself kicked out faster? ^.~
(Also, the books are wrong on how that works, but it's the best understanding Terra has right now... ^.~ )
Probably the bigger thing to worry about is con-men, claiming to have Secret Power that the Guild Doesn't Want You To Access, able to do far more and for far cheaper prices without all that stuffy bureaucracy and meddling getting in the way. Of course, such men can barely make some sparkles appear, enough to make you believe the problem lies elsewhere, and if you just cough up a few (dozen) more Sovereigns, surely they can buy the Really Good Materials from their Secret Connections and you'll get what you want. ^.~
And then, once in a long while, you get the crazy fool who does get their hands on a book at just the right level of "Too powerful for them to use safely" and "Not too powerful they can't understand it well enough to activate it at all", and you end up with someone exploding a fireball in their face in the middle of a library and burning down half the city. >.> Even worse if they've been using "shortcuts" to try to gain power quickly, like abusing powdered Dragon Scale to overload their reserves of power...
As for why Tola is so good at magic, well, that's an interesting question. Magic potential is mostly inherited: two powerful mages will usually have powerful children, and two magically-dead parents will usually have children who struggle to light a candle with all their might. But there's also enough randomness thrown in that you can't really predict it. Like, 80% chance it works normally. That isn't to say you can't succeed if you work at it, it's not a measure of "maximum potential", just "starting talent". The biggest factor in power is practice. The more you channel energy, the more you become able to channel.
Current books teach that the soul generates magical energy, and it's like any other muscle, you grow it through exercise but you can over-exert yourself and cause problems. Most "shortcuts" are like steroids, they might boost you in the short term but they'll do severe damage in the long term by pouring more energy through you than you're naturally generating, and in serious cases that can mean draining your soul to a dangerous extent. Dragon Scale, for instance, is linked to megalomania, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and an addiction to the rush of power because it makes you feel invincible. Users stop relying on their own soul to generate magic, taking more and more Scale, until the impurities and residue clinging to their soul causes them to sicken and damages their ability to use magic at all. Granted, most users end up doing something... ill-advised that gets them killed long before reaching that point. Like performing highly unethical experiments on captives, letting them escape, and failing to protect themselves from angry dragons because they didn't think they could possibly mess things up to such a degree... Ah, Elimaio, did your abuse of Scale get you kicked out of the Guild, or did it just cause you to get yourself kicked out faster? ^.~
(Also, the books are wrong on how that works, but it's the best understanding Terra has right now... ^.~ )
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