Elemental Cats

Toz couldn't wait until the next jellyfish appeared. After he had finally gotten to see the results of his fireball striking something, he received a burst of inspiration on how to improve it the next time. The explosion was powerful but also unnecessarily flashy. The width of the fireball's explosion could be handy when dealing with a bunch of enemies. However, if Toz attacked a single enemy, mightier than anything he had faced previously, the rain of flames would do more harm than good since it blocked his view of his opponent.

There was also the aspect of the fireball's slow flight. Although Toz had other means of attacking which were more suited to high-speed combat, none of them were as powerful as his fireball. The darkness spell he was working on was in second place, but it was still lacking in usability compared to the fireball.

The darkness spell was a nightmare for Toz's mana pool. And it also didn't inflict physical damage to its target, so if Toz couldn't harm his opponent after using the darkness spell, he would be in trouble since he would be out of mana.

That was why he was trying to figure out how to improve the spell and make it less of a mana devourer. However, he wasn't finding any progress with that, and now he had his fireball spell to work on, so he decided to prioritize that temporarily.

But modifying a spell that Toz had just learned wasn't so easy. Even if he knew what he wanted to accomplish, he didn't know how to reach the point where he had accomplished it.

If it had been basic magic, Toz could have just willed the mana to follow his instructions. However, things were different with advanced magic. Toz followed the grimoire's instructions and the formula it provided for awakening the mana. When doing it like that, the mana would go along with the instructions provided in the awakening process.

When casting a spell, only a small part of the true nature of mana is brought to the surface, and the one or few aspects of the element are what go into the spell. So, when the spell is cast, the mana follows its nature and completes the spell in the way described in the awakening process.

If Toz wanted to change the spells' effects in detail, he would have to change the spell itself.

Considering Toz had only relatively recently learned the spell, it wasn't much more than a fool's errand.

The power Toz showed while casting the fireball didn't come from his understanding of the spell. It came from his affinity for fire, as well as his capacity for mana and magic. Toz was, at most, a novice regarding the spell itself. And usually, people would have to have mastered the spell before they tried to change it to suit their needs.

Toz knew that. But he still decided to try different ways of casting the spell, just like when he had done some finetuning on how he used his mana after the first few fireballs he fired. Though, that was more like learning the proper way to use the spell compared to how he was trying to change it now. And in the end, Toz wasn't someone who would let preconceived notions limit his progress on the path of magic. Or sword-fighting for that manner.

At another place on the island, not far from Toz, Mindle sat, working on her own spell. While she wasn't planning on doing any modifications or anything like Toz was doing, she was still eager to improve. It had been some time since she managed to conjure the second Tongue of the Tongues of Flame. But she wasn't planning on trying to conjure another.

Toz's fireball showed Mindle an aspect of her spell she had unintentionally ignored. While using her spell, she had always made it her priority to reduce the heat and control the power so the void beasts she used the spell against weren't incinerated. While that had made her adept at controlling the exact temperature and power of her flames, it had also limited how powerful they could become.

Mindle had never tried out how much heat and flames the tongues could emit. The weak flames were useful since they were an efficient way of killing the void fish without destroying their bodies completely. However, Mindle's pride as the group's greatest firepower was on the line. If her tongues of flame were known for being weak, her reputation would be sullied.

Unfortunately, it was challenging for Mindle to experiment with the power of her tongues on the island and without any targets. She could crank up the heat and limit the area to the flames' immediate surroundings, so she didn't light the island on fire, but that didn't tell her anything about the power of the flames.

After confirming that Toz didn't have an immediate need to try out his spell again, Mindle volunteered to take care of the next time a void beast attacked them. No one had an issue with that since it would mean no clean-up for Hods and Stitches, and the warehouse was still filled to the brim with void meat.

However, it seemed like Mindle was out of luck. After the seventh level jellyfish that Toz turned into dust, there weren't any signs of other void beasts anywhere close to them.

After Nil's upgrades, they had seen swarms of lower level void beasts pass by without attacking them. The island's improvements scared away weak beasts just as it attracted stronger beasts. Those swarms were a good indication of how many beasts there were in the area. And now that there wasn't a single void beast in sight, it became clear that they had arrived at a place in the Void that wasn't as densely populated with void beasts as other parts of the Void.

Although Hods and Stitches had lived in a community of Void dwellers, they didn't know much about the Void. And since the two with the most knowledge of the Void didn't suspect anything, neither did anyone else.

However, it might have been too early for them to dismiss the absence of the Void Beasts as something ordinary.

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