Homegrown System

After that exchange, the conversation dried up, leaving Alice and Titus to their own devices. After a few minutes underway, Alice got up and wandered around the ship. Or was it a boat? She didn't know the right terminology, but luckily, there wasn't anyone around to offend. Titus didn't seem to be too picky, even if he had gotten into the captain role a little bit.

She explored the insides and the few rooms there were, finding a large floppy sun hat made of some sort of stiff material but with enough give that it had a whimsical look. Trying it on, it fit her well, and she went back out to explore the lower deck at the front of the ship. There she found a recliner and a nice breeze as they sailed along at a respectable pace. Titus was a little bit out of sight, so she felt she had a bit of privacy.

Adjusting the recliner so that she was almost entirely lying down, she stretched, enjoying the feeling of the warm Mediterranean sun on her skin, and settled down. Maybe to take a nap, maybe just to think. She tilted her hat forward until it covered her eyes, pillowed her arms behind her head, and stared at the brim of the hat blocking her vision.

They had little idea how long the trip could be. It could be as short as over to the next horizon, or it could be another two days of travel at their current pace. Maybe they'd find the supercomputer center on an island somewhere. There was just nothing they could do, and it was a bit of a problem. At least in the car, there were monsters to fight and routes to plan, and it was distracting. Now, all she had were her thoughts.

She started going through the last couple of days. There were so many things she could have done differently. Perhaps if she had rushed to the supercomputer center first or not taken a helicopter… Flying had been dangerous when there were dangerous monsters lurking around… Things could have gone much worse.

There were just too many things to consider. She tried to focus on productive things and skill choices. There were several other skill choices she wanted, but it looked like she wasn't going to get another one until level 13. That left the question of classes. What classes could she get? Titus had gotten something that sounded epic. Was it based on what insights he had, the accomplishments from throughout his life, or the System's whims? Could she count on the System giving her special favoritism? She did have a title related to that, after all.

More skills, more power. Something mysterious about classes. There was also more that she didn't really understand. Something Titus didn't seem to understand. Was Telos or Dao the word used? Either way, the word seemed to be associated with purpose.

It kind of made sense. It was a sort of wishy-washy ancient theory for her, though. Maybe some philosophers would enjoy thinking about it, but she'd prefer to be thinking about some technical problem. But if the magic really worked on narrowing your focus, picking one thing to work for, and then letting that become your understanding of the world, which then guided your magic... maybe the ancients were onto something.

Alice closed her eyes and tried to feel the mana inside her. She could see the mana all around, so perhaps understanding the essence of something wouldn't be as difficult as she feared. If that stopped her from ever getting an E grade, well, that would be disappointing. Titus was already significantly more powerful than her, and he was only two levels into D grade. Sure, her magic gave her options that he just didn't have, at least not yet. His class skills seemed rather magical to her, but... well, she wasn't going to be much use.

Titus was right. What if they failed? What if she couldn't fix everything? Or what if her fix was incomplete? She figured the most likely outcome was absolute failure. Still, the next most likely was some sort of reduction in the impact of the System, making it hamstrung in a way. But that didn't mean that there weren't other possibilities... Well, she wasn't really sure about how to plan for those, but even if she managed to get the System to go away, it didn't mean magic would go away. Would her sense of magic go away? Would she not be able to see it anymore? Maybe the System-granted skills would go away, but the feeling of mana in her body wasn't from any skill. It was her skills that had made her aware of it. But now she could feel that no skill was actually active. She could just trace the mana as it circulated through her body.

She breathed it in, and it washed through her limbs and core in a mesmerizing spiral. Spinning the mana up and back, she found she could even influence the flow. Speed it up, slow it down, direct it. However, putting it in one part of her body didn't seem to have any real effects. It wasn't like in stories where she focused her mana on her arm, her arm swelled to a comically proportional size, and she could punch a hole through a building while breaking her arm in half. No, that wasn't quite right. Something was different, though.

She could feel it gathering. When she had cast Mana Bolt a few times in fights, it was a surge exiting from the finger she was pointing. Could she cast it from her nose? She thought so, but didn't want to risk attracting too much attention to the boat. Then she realized they were on a boat. The only thing moving was the water.

She stood up, walked over to the railing, and looked down, focusing on trying to cast the Mana Bolt from her face into the water. Nothing happened, but her nose did start to tingle as she concentrated mana around it. Interesting. Then, she sneezed. Was that just the saltwater, or had the mana actually been doing something?

Alice pointed and fired a bolt into the water. It displaced a couple of gallons with a large splash that was drowned out by the boat's engines. She cast a few more times with each finger but couldn't make it cast out of her elbow before she started to run low on mana, and her head started to throb. She considered going up to Titus for that mana recovery potion but resisted the impulse. The headache would fade in a little bit as mana regenerated.

Was it regeneration? Actually, she almost didn't know. Where did her mana come from? Was it from the ambient magic of the universe that the System had tapped into? Or was it coming from within herself?

Sitting back down, she didn't lay back this time and put her hat on her head, shading her face as she closed her eyes and assumed a cross-legged position like she imagined some ancient monk would. Frowning, she felt the much-reduced amount of mana spiral through her body and focused on it. When she had breathed in, it had moved. It moved with her breath. So she breathed in deeply, focusing on trying to feel the mana coming in with the air in her lungs. But that wasn't it. Was it welling up from within her as she breathed and her heart pumped it out? No, it wasn't quite that either. It was a strange mix.

As she breathed in, she could feel it coming in through all of her pores, but at the same time, as she breathed out, the mana came from nothing within her heart. Somewhere in her heart, at least. Perhaps not the heart itself, but something behind it, closer towards her back, but offset from reality in some way.

She repeated the cycle over and over again. She'd breathe in and pull mana from the world around her, and then she'd breathe out, and mana poured in from somewhere else that was already inside her. And then, if she held her breath, the two would mix, and it would become the mana that circled through her. If she just breathed in, the mana poured in from her pores but sat on the surface level, not really mixing with the flow inside of her mana. And if she just breathed out, the mana from inside her saturated her body but didn't move. It was the interplay between the two that caused them to mix. And then, if she held her breath, she needed to move and stir it like she would cookie batter or something. It felt just a little bit more fluid. As it mixed, she could control it, and when it was in motion, she could guide it. But when it sat still, it was like grasping at fog or trying to move a mountain.

All very poetical descriptions. I never fancied myself a wordsmith.

Alice's concentration was broken by the sudden thought, and she laughed. Opening her eyes, she felt better. How long had she been focusing on stirring her mana? She couldn't tell. The sun had moved slightly, but there was still no sign of land on the horizon. She got up, stretched, walked around, and cast several more mana bolts into the water, this time trying not to launch them from odd spaces but trying to be more accurate. Could she hit exactly the right wave cap instead of just pointing in the general direction?

She was able to fire five before she ran out of mana again. She went back to spinning and cycling the mana in different ways, trying them out to see what gathered more mana. She shifted her focus back and forth between the two types: the kind from within and the kind from without.

She was about halfway to making some groundbreaking realization of the nature of it and how it worked when it combined when the ship lurched.

Titus shouted out in surprise. "Alice, you okay?"

She opened her eyes and called back, "Yes. What was that?"

"I don't know, I didn't see. Can you see anything from down there?"

Alice ran to the railing and looked down. "No. Do you?"

But she didn't receive an answer. Hurriedly, she sprinted over to the ladder and climbed up to the next deck, where the captain's station was—or was it a pilot's station? She really needed to learn some boat terms—and saw that Titus was busy. A giant purple tentacle had slapped down next to where he had been standing, and now he was hacking at it with his ax. Despite the sharp blade, it bounced right off.

Alice pointed and, with a startled cry, fired a mana bolt. It sank into the rubbery tentacle before exploding and tearing it nearly in half. The thing lifted off the deck and reeled back as the boat lurched, tipping its prow up out of the waves. She managed to get a look at what had grabbed them from behind. A giant black beak was the only thing she saw in the mass of rubbery flesh. And the System identification gave her no comfort.

[Baby Kraken, Level 38].