In the seven months that had passed, Ana befriended Lili and grew fond of the girl. Lili was shy but also an excellent conversationalist once she opened up. Even Lia had grown fond of the girl, as she reminded the spirit of her mortal youth.

But Ana didn’t spend all that time with her head buried in the sand. She wanted to learn as much as possible about her options before the inevitable decision came. And as it turns out, there were a lot of benefits in joining the military as she would be increasing her proficiency with magic. The very thing she needed in order to return home. The drawbacks on the other hand were not pretty. The high command could reassign her at any moment, as mages were the equivalent of missiles in this world.

The idea of finding herself burning villages in a few years was terrifying, and on that point, even Lia agreed. But if she could climb into a position of a commander, it would be easy sailing. Because of her gift and Nathaniel’s friendship, she had the freedom to choose whatever posting she wanted.

The other options were even worse, as much as wizards were sought after, no one wanted them near a city. It made sense, if she had a short temper and got into a fight, a lot of property damage could ensue. With every conversation, her pool of choices shrank, until she was left with three. Joining Silv was the first, and his band specifically as they worked relatively close to the city and would return every few months. Or she could set off on her own, doing odd jobs to survive and travel.

The third was to accept the contract to get herself bound to a ship for the foreseeable future. A lot of money was in that last one, but it meant she would be stuck on a ship and the boredom would be the end of her. Silv was supposed to return soon and she opted to wait and have a non-alcoholic conversation with the man.

But learning that it would be at least a month before they returned meant that she still had a lot of time. Her training now consisted mostly of doing exercises to increase the speed of forming spells and experimenting to create new ones. And now she had time to work on an idea that had been floating around for a while.

Using magic she could create and manipulate the electromagnetic field, and that gave her the idea of making something crazy. Not wanting to waste time she set it aside as other subjects took precedence. But after spending a day hunched over a stack of papers, she decided that it was time to test the crazy idea.

Her calculations showed that if she used a simple method, it was possible to achieve, but it depended on the copper. After explaining the Lorenz force and her idea to Nathaniel, he got her the materials she needed. To him, the idea sounded promising and made him giddy like a child on Christmas morning.

It took them a week to assemble the prototype, working with several craftsmen to make the process easier. The housing was made of dry wood and acted as an insulator, with the two rails inside having their ends connected, and when coupled with the projectile, it made a closed loop. The length of the prototype was a hot debate between the two, so they crafted two designs. One being a little longer than a meter, while the other was over two meters long.

For projectiles, Ana chose steel pellets, as developing the technology to use anything different would take too long. The steel they had wasn’t of the highest grade but it served the purpose. For the location of the tests, they decided to leave the city.

In the time they were building the prototype railguns, Ana crafted a new spell. Something that would allow her to create and control a current. Which was difficult without a multimeter telling her the value. Her scale went from a tingly feeling to lightning, so she focused on refining that.

Soon the time to test the prototypes came, and she could see that Nathaniel was excited to see them work, while Ana felt that they would most certainly not. But the scientist in her craved experimentation.

It was midday when they set up, on a hill close to the town. Nathaniel’s bodyguards and Borka tagging along, as there was a possibility of encountering something or someone hostile. While mages were extremely dangerous, they bleed like anyone else, and a surprise attack could take them out without fail.

The first to be tested was the smaller prototype, and Ana being the only one who knew the spell meant that she would be firing the proto railgun. The fact that everyone took a few steps back didn’t give her confidence. But she started working on her spell, aiming at a solitary tree only around a dozen meters away.

Forming the spell was quick, but then she had to connect the current through the anode and the cathode. The circuit in a railgun gets broken quickly and she just needed to supply the power on one side, while making a negative charge on the other. Months of experimenting had shown her that she had a high resistance to electricity for some reason.

Nathaniel had a similar ability with fire, and while both of them could die from exposure to electricity and fire respectably, it was the most inefficient way to go about doing so. Mentally shrugging she continued. Releasing her spell, firing the projectile. The whole process happened in a flash.

The projectile struck, tearing through the tree with a thunderous crack before getting lodged in another tree down the line. The kickback wasn’t hard compared to the damage the weapon did, but the materials they used to construct the weapon proved to be too weak. The copper melted while the wood caught on fire. She threw it down and with the help of Nathaniel the fire didn’t cause any problems.

“Too much power.” She wheezed, rubbing her shoulder. “Gonna need to scale down my spell, by a lot.” The second test came an hour later after the group had something to eat, taking a break to let Ana and Nathaniel debate. For the big gun, they were smart enough to build a tripod, and after securing it underground the prototype was ready.

Ever so slowly increasing the power wasn’t feasible as a railgun needed high voltages and strong magnetic fields to be effective, but she tried a few times with different power values. Seeing that the rails were becoming degraded a decision was made. She held onto the gun from the side and pumped as much power as she could.

Then several things happened at once, a large bang and a cloud formed at the tip of the gun, the tree she was aiming at fell down, and so did a few behind that one. The tripod broke, so did the railgun, but not before catching on fire and spewing molten copper.

Thankfully she avoided getting hit. A few moments later with a big grin, she turned around to see the same grin on Nathaniel’s face, while Borka held her ears and the two bodyguards looked around with their weapons drawn.

“It works!” After the ringing in their ears had subsided the two mages threw themselves in a discussion about today’s events. The potential stopping power was magnificent and both of them had an idea to start working on a spell, avoiding the use of physical components. That spell would then make any magnetic piece of metal, a weapon of mass destruction in their hands.

The rest of the month the pair worked in that, with Ana being the teacher this time around. Nathaniel had to understand the basics of electromagnetism if he was to be successful. And she had to give credit to the man, he either knew more than he led on or she was just that good at teaching.

It took them two weeks before any testing could be done, and once again they left the city to do some tests. While it took them less than a day to form a spell, the rest of the time was spent looking at different designs and reducing the complexity.

Lightning was child’s play in comparison. Creating a ridiculous amount of power proved to be much easier than controlling that power. Creating magnetic fields was similar to creating fire. And while Nathaniel could do some amazing things with fire, Ana truly had a gift with electromagnetism. The more Ana played with magnetic fields, the easier it became. And there another idea formed in her mind.

She had opted for using a staff so her blows wouldn’t be lethal, which was fine when fighting sentient and thinking people, but if she ended in a fight with a monster, something pointy would come in handy. And this spell was quite pointy, but the time it took to set it up removed the practical use of it. Still, both of them had a new toy in their boxes.

But while she was on the budget, she explored other solutions on how to fix that problem. Her magic was quite lethal but also draining, and she was looking for some smaller spells that didn’t require much. And through experimentation, she noticed that small magnetic fields were so easy to create and control, that she could practically use a small spell constantly. The fact that she had a Ph.D. in physics, and in the field of electromagnetism no less, it made sense why she was so good at it.

After playing around for a few hours she had a request to make. After months of refusing to train with a blade she now requested not one, but two. Nathaniel’s curiosity won over, and he got her the two swords.

Ana knew very little of swords and their designs, but she requested longer blades, and the ones she received looked amazing. Both blades were virtually identical and were more than a meter long as they almost got up to her chest.

Both were in plain-looking scabbards, not sheats as she was corrected. As she requested, both blades were dull practice swords. While waiting for the swords she made some training dummies out of straw with Lili’s help. Holding on to the scabbards of the sheathed swords she loosened her shoulders and stretched her neck in preparation.

Alright, you ready girl?

Oh yeah, let's show them how it's done. Focusing her mind she brought her spell into effect in less than a second. The two swords left their scabbards and turned around, floating in the air. Anna dropped the now empty pieces of wood and leather to the ground, gesturing with her hands. She was never ambidextrous, but with Lia’s help, she could use her left hand just as well as her right.

She focused on maintaining her spell while directing her body, and with that, the two floating swords both struck different targets like two knights had held the blades. Both of them withdrew and struck again, one in what would be the neck of the dummy and the other in the knee. Their motion was fluid and fast.

She continued her strikes until the straw got too loose and the dummies fell into heaps of straw and rope. Picking up the scabbards she slowly recalled the swords until they were safely sheathed. After which she bowed to a small applause.

Looking at Nathaniel she saw that he wasn’t clapping, only smirking.

“Only two?” His voice sounded disappointed, but it didn’t deter Ana in the slightest, what's more, it only gave her more motivation as she said.

“For now.” She tried using more than two objects but it became harder to control as there was a limit to what Lia could accomplish and her mind was already busy with controlling the spell. But who knew, maybe more practice meant she could wield more than two blades at the time. Her range was also limited to about ten meters, beyond which the energy consumption rendered the spell obsolete for its purpose.

For the rest of the week, she added sword practice, sometimes with Borka and sometimes with the guards at the manor. They were competent fighters and it took her a while to get used to the fast pace of combat, and with only using that spell she lost more often than not.

Still, every mistake had taught her a lesson. If she did end up joining Silv, or some other band, she wanted to be ready for anything. The only counter she lacked so far was magic, as the best counter for magic was to not get hit in the first place. She still struggled to form a shield out of force, but in practice, she discovered another way she could protect herself. A simple and crude option only she had.

Expelling magic from her to form a bubble of wild magic that disintegrated anything that came into contact with it. But that had its downsides also, experimenting she found that arrows for example weren’t an issue, no matter how fast they flew. Unless the enemy aimed at her head, as when the arrow disintegrated the dust kept its momentum and ran straight into her eyes.

The same went with other items, such as when Borka threw an old barrel and Ana ate a handful of barrel dust. It was her fastest spell in defense. In the offense, it took time to direct the energy and it was slow-moving, not an ideal combat situation. There were plenty of spells that she could successfully use now, some with greater effects than others.

But their focus wasn’t only on spells, Ana learned several rituals and quite a few runes as well. Both were excellent in their own rights, but rituals demanded time while runes preparation. Rituals were longer-lasting or just larger spells, while runes reacted with magic to produce certain effects. Every material reacted to magic differently, and when you added sigils and glyphs to channel that magic, the effects it could create was quite something else.

Not all of her spells were for destruction, as magic was also used to create. But just as life goes, creating something was vastly more difficult than destroying it. People with magic were rare, at least those fully able to utilize it, so the emphasis was put on destruction.

That was another thing, magic manifested in many different ways. There were tens, if not hundreds of different gifts. Wizards being on top as the be-all and end-all. But someone could be born with a minor ability in foresight, or with manipulating certain elements. Those were more common than full-fledged wizards but still rare in the grand scheme of things.

Ana imagined herself having a swiss army knife when compared to those with smaller gifts. With everything she learned she could do, staying humble became increasingly harder. Lia wasn’t helping in that situation as she constantly wanted Ana to brag and show off, her pride in the relationship the two shared.

Days passed in practice and study until a messenger arrived that the Ghost war band had returned to the city. She wanted to sprint down and have a talk immediately but realized that the man had other things to do in the city. So instead, with Nathaniel's council, she invited Silv, the quartermaster Renvi, and a few other officials over for dinner.

If she did join and get a few accomplishments, she could later on rise in the ranks and retire with a good reputation. If she got bored she could even go into politics as Nathaniel had done. But she desired to accumulate wealth so that she could spend her time traveling and researching a way to get back home. But joining also meant that for the next twenty years she would be bound to service. Considering she spent more time getting to her degree and now that she learned that age for her wasn’t an issue, lessened that problem.

That night everyone she invited showed up. Everyone but Silv had a gleam in their eye, already thinking that they won her over. Silv on the other hand was just glad to see her like an old friend reuniting. The soldier most likely didn’t get much time to create lasting friendships outside of his band, and there he was a commander which impaired things when it came to friendships.

After dinner and small talk, when everyone got their pipes and enjoyed their drinks the conversation landed on why they were invited.

With Nathaniel's advice, she told them who she was, or rather where she was from. Not going into too many details about the technology and focusing on the cultural aspect, she found that her audience wasn’t as shocked as she expected.

On earth if someone claimed to be from another world they would get laughed at, here it only sparked their interest in her being special, smart, and talented. But it served the purpose of increasing the military’s desire to enlist her.

What she was curious about was if Silv wanted her to join his ranks, what kind of things they got up to, what her service would entail in detail, and so forth. Every answer was as she expected, with a few surprises here and there. Silv was confused as to why she wanted to join his team tasked with hunting monsters, while the officials loved the idea as his band wasn’t operating in the most dangerous places. For her, it was simple as she liked the man when they met, and she didn’t have delusions that after getting some experience fighting that she would be sent to where a wizard was needed.

No one wanted to waste her gifts, and she expected as much. She didn’t demand a posting where killing wouldn’t be required as she knew that she was joining the military and not the boy scouts.

At the end of the night, all her questions were answered, and Ana was torn. Was she looking for an excuse not to join? They were understanding and accommodating, and now the only thing keeping her from saying yes was herself.

So she imagined herself back home, what if she joined the military then? While she was younger one of her desires was to join the airforce, because flying equaled cool. But her home country lacked a decent airforce and with her parents pushing her to focus on school, she dropped the idea.

And now she would get that chance, because as a wizard she wasn’t just a soldier, but had the reputation of a fighter pilot.

But with other options worse, and with Lia on board she decided to say yes.