"You know, I never was able to understand that," Blue was on the couch watching some videos on her tablet. She shifted her focus to Hera, who was on the ground with several holographic spell circles around her as she tried to figure out something.

"And by that, you mean what exactly?" Hera asked without looking up, but she lowered the volume of the music she had on. Since she was working with engravings, she wanted to focus and not get distracted by the television. But staying in complete silence was also an issue, so she pulled up a stream of lo-fi beats to help her focus.

"Spell circles. I've asked Bonnie and Helena to explain to me, but they were not the best teachers. Bonnie went straight to some complicated way of how things worked and what I should do to avoid the issues, and Helena kind of babied me too much. Like I asked about the spell circle, and she started to ask me about how mana and magic worked in a patronizing way. She didn't meant it like that, I know, but it was a bit hurtful. And when I gave a wrong answer, she gave me the right one without explaining why I was wrong. It felt like a parent doing their kid's homework," Blue sighed.

"Really? Helena never felt like that to me. I can try to explain it to you if you want. Now that I think about it, you might be able to use very big spell circles with Stormcloud," Hera looked up.

"Sure… I guess," Blue shrugged.

"So, you know how you need to give instructions in your spells. You use programming, right?"

"Yeah."

"OK, now imagine that you're doing it here instead of saying the instructions in your mind," Hera gestured to the spell circle.

"Right… but how can I tell what each piece of the circle does? Like it's a language or something?"

"Sort of. It's a bit of a mixture of trial and error and an attempt to create a language that you can understand. For instance, The circle itself, the line surrounding everything, usually is just a river where your mana will flow when you put it inside. Now, if I start from here, sending my mana in this direction, it will follow the clockwise rotation of the circle, and that's the order of the steps of whatever is inside."

Blue perked up. Now she was listening with more attention. The way Hera was explaining to her made more sense than all the times that she had tried to figure it out herself or when she asked someone else to teach her how those spell circles worked. Even if someone else told her those basics, it was the first time that she was beginning to see how it worked, "OK, so if you put mana from one point or another, that will change things?"

"Yep. Quite a lot of spell circles have, like, small 'mistakes' around the circle. It's a way to tell mana, 'hey, start from here.' But you need to be a bit more careful when making one like that because you need to also add a way to push the mana in the right direction. Or make it so that it doesn't matter the direction it's going, the spell will work the way it's supposed to," Hera showed a few examples of premade spell circles to make it clearer.

Blue stared at them for a few moments, trying to understand what would guide the mana, "I get this one. There's this line here in the bottom, and the circle is mirrored, so it doesn't matter where it goes, but what about these?" She pointed to another two spell circles that didn't seem to have a proper order like Hera was explaining.

"These are about how deep or wide the circle is. Look, both start at the small line, right?" Hera looked at Blue, who nodded in confirmation, "OK, now on this one, look how the line gets thicker and thicker when going clockwise."

"But why doesn't the mana just go to the thickest part?"

"That's a bit hard to answer. A lot of people have different theories. One of the most accepted ones is that mana doesn't like abrupt things. If you have a hole and a slope, the mana will go to the slope where the change will occur gradually and not right away. People even say that's the reason why spells work. When we force mana to do something, it tries its best to just finish the job and return to where it was before. Another option is that mana can understand the instructions given, just like it does with our spells. Or, it's just the system doing its thing. But if all that seems confusing for you, there are other ways," Hera pulled a pen made by her room and drew a few runes in the air, "The dwarves from Boothudurn have a different way of using spell circles. They actually call this rune magic. Instead of having an actual circle, they made a language very similar to programming and made it so that every rune has a weight, a priority."

"Can't I just write in code then?" Blue asked.

"For some reason, that doesn't work. Then again, it's kind of good. If it would work with the code, it should work with words. Imagine if you were reading a book and suddenly something happened because you put mana on it. My understanding is that it has to be a language made to work with mana. Oh, and all parts must be connected. That's why letters wouldn't work. Well... Maybe cursive."

Hera was lost in thought for a moment but she quickly snapped back to reality. To continue her explanation she made a rune that was a square with an open top and another that was a hexagon with a diamond inside, "I really don't remember what all the runes are, but the rule of thumb is the more lines a rune has the heavier it is. Then, when they pour mana into the rune, the manner will follow the order from lightest to heaviest. It will never start a heavy rune unless the connecting lighter rune was already filled. I use some similar concepts to the spell circles I make. Each of the symbols I write has a different priority. The spiral is considered priority 2, meaning it will always come second. That's because the elemental symbols are priority ones. When I'm making a spell circle that I want to have a specific limit or effect, I need to first pass the manner through the element and then through the spiral to mix it up and make sure that all the mana inside it is correct. Only then I can push to the next step. I also have these," Hera showed a few different symbols that she usually put around the spell circle, "These are my fail safes. They are here just in case the spell goes out of control. One is a monitor, another is a way for the spell to collapse on itself, and this one is the one that disperses the mana when it gets the warning. These are considered priority zero, meaning that they should always be active for anything else to work."

"Why do you need something like that? If the spell circle fails, wouldn't it just waste mana?" Blue asked.

"In the best-case scenario, yeah. But sometimes, the process is already too deep into itself to be stopped. It never happened to me, but I've read stories about people who didn't have any precautions on their spells and created large explosions or some seriously bad effects that hurt everybody around them. That's why I keep my fail safes in all spells that I'm trying out."

"I see, that's important then. By the way, what do you use spell circles for? I don't think I ever saw you using one in a dungeon," Blue asked without looking away from the spell circles Hera showed her. For the first time, these things were making sense.

"Well, I can't actually use them inside dungeons. I mostly use them to help me control my mana when I'm trying to make a new spell or when I'm trying to copy the tamer's skills. Now that I have the court, I might be able to do something about it in the middle of a fight, but I still don't know how," Hera sighed.

"Have you ever heard about formations?" Blue asked.

"Like. Phalanx and things like that?"

"Not really. I've been reading this comic about a bunch of warriors in a world without a system, and they use these things called formations. It's basically a way to organize yourself and your party in a certain position to create a magical effect. Now that you're talking about spell circles, it does seem like something similar. Maybe there's a way to use your blades as the spell circle."

Hera looked at Daskka, who asked for a moment to look some stuff up. Both of them seemed interested in that idea. If there really was a way to use her own blades as parts of a spell without anyone getting hurt, Hera could start to do some real damage. Most spell circles were considerably stronger than a simple spell than one could cast on their own. This was because, in the spell circle, there were a lot more details and a tighter structure that guided the mana to work in a certain way. Not to mention, you could improve a spell circle again and again. Eventually, the writing would be so advanced that it would look like something on a completely different scale.

"That's an interesting idea, but I have no clue how to start. Do they explain anything else about how those formations work?" Hera asked.

"Not really. It's all very vague. Like one is the foundation, and the other is the spear and some weird analogies that don't even make much sense. One comic that I read a while back had a better explanation. It said that the energy they used in that world, which is called Ki, or qui, or chi, or whatever, should be passed from one to another and have their elements complementing each other. They have like a five-element rule that each element is weaker than another and at the same time can strengthen another element. From what I can remember, the idea was to just push the energy around to make each other stronger. That's even why they had to have five members so they could do it in order," Blue was trying to remember the name of the comic, but she read so many of them that it was hard to pinpoint which one had that particular explanation.

"Could something like that work?" Hera turned to Daskka, who was on the floor, helping her out with the engravings and now searching something about the legacy.

"Maybe. I couldn't find any skills that are related to that. Not anything called formation, at least. But in theory, some elements could help each other, but you already know that, like using wind to make a fire spell stronger or spread out more. But if you want to do something like what Blue is saying, you need to figure it out on your own. It won't be something that the legacy already dealt with," Daskka explained while scratching the top of her head with her tail.

"We should go to a dungeon later to test it out. But let's go someplace where the entrance is not actually dangerous or at least where we can kill all the monsters easily," Hera nodded.

"Why go to a dungeon? Couldn't you just practice in one of the training rooms?" Blue asked.

"If I'm being honest, I'm weirded out about using my legacy inside one of the training rooms. I know the guild talks a lot about those spaces being private and that there are no cameras, but there are sensors and other things in there. That's how we can use the training AI. What if they have some sort of deal to sell some information about what some explorers can do? It's just like social media companies that sell our data. Especially now that they are so close to the New Dawn. I still don't trust them," Hera replied.

Blue nodded in response. Even if the controller wasn't that against the New Dawn, she understood Hera's feelings. Some time passed, and Hera finally felt confident enough to attempt to engrave a buff in one of her weapons. In fact, she wanted to do that on two different weapons. The first was her chakram because, according to Daskka, There was a chance that the number of engravings one other place could receive wouldn't be affected by engravings that happened before the weapon joined her court. The second weapon she wanted to test was Executioner. Mostly to understand what would happen if one of her court members received an engraving.

Hera had two ideas. The first was to use a simple enhanced strength buff using one of the engravings. The second that she would use on the chakram was an engraving to add elemental damage to its attacks. It was a more complicated engraving, but it still seemed to be easy enough for her to make without any problems. Both of them were not constantly active. They would only be triggered when there was a magic-based buff in the weapons since they required mana to function, but they wouldn't affect the duration or cost of said buffs. Hera read about engravings that either only required mana to be engraved and would be active all the time after that, or that would trigger actual skills, but those were very advanced versions that she had no idea how to do.

Another issue about the engravings was that a member of her court could only receive an engraving that she made herself. If the engraving was made before the blade became part of the legacy, there wouldn't be any problems. Hera started with her first engraving, which was the most complicated of the two, by using a wand-like tool that would function as a hot knife. The tip would heat up by using her mana to allow the marking of weapons. The main difficulty about doing something in a chakram was that the engraving had to be a certain size, and since the weapon wasn't big enough. Because of that, she would have to draw the circle around the blade without messing up the ratio. It took her about five tries before making the spell circle work which was a good thing since each time she failed, the area where she tried to make the engraving became useless. Not that the weapon stopped being effective, but she couldn't make any other spell circles on that area, and, by the dimensions of the chakram, she only had five attempts. She was even using the holograms made by her room to wrap around the chakram but that didn't stop her from failing a few times. Fortunately, after three hours of work, she managed to complete the elemental effect on her chakram.

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Screaming Ooze Chakram

Rarity: Uncommon

A chakram made out of an agglomeration of cores from the screaming ooze. Because of the material, the weapon makes a unique sound when it is moved at high speeds. The blade is somewhat malleable when exposed to high temperatures.

Attribute Scaling:

Strength: x3.6 Charisma: x2.8 Luck: x2.2

Weapon skill:

Howl:

You can make your weapon scream, causing nearby creatures to run away in fear or to become frozen in place.

Range: 50 meters

Mana cost: 200 mana

Engraving:

Deals 10% of the damage as lightning damage.

Familiarity: 53%

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Feeling happy that it had worked, Hera was about to summon Executioner when Daskka spoke up, "Hey, you can add one more member to your court now!"