Nebel was teaching five people at once, as many teachers can tell you teaching five people one thing is easy, try thirty people and eight subjects. The part that made it interesting was what he was doing on the side, as Rosa, Charles, Frederick and two suck ups try to replicate Nebel’s feat of imagining a simple system in its entirety contained within a few small objects and Nebel is both showing them how and giving them tips to mental visualization, he is also having a little fun with a certain would be thug.

Said thug was currently tumbling in thin air thanks to a few simple vectors Nebel was keeping active with his imagination before tossing him back into the air whenever he needed to show his five students how to do something. It was like juggling… if juggling was the act of tossing a grown man thirty feet into the air just so you didn’t have to stop tormenting him for even a second.

As it was Nebel had been playing this game for five minutes, ever since two of the three stooges had given up their leader as the one who “forced them” to help him. Nebel was slowly getting tired of it and he was sure the puke splashed around the axis of the thugs spin was proof that his point had gotten across, anyway he couldn’t really keep it up any longer his mental condition was barely above migraine causing.

Nebel catches the thug with one last vector and meaning to twirl him but this time with a little push, imagines the vector doing the job… the thug of course spins on one heel and falls on his butt but Nebel notices that his mental condition lowers by only half the amount it would with a simple twirl.

He was going to have to find out how that was possible… but first

“So have you learnt your lesson?” he asks the thug, like an adult asking a naughty child.

“Yes, oh Great Arch mage Nebel!” the man blurts out in fear.

“Ok then join the rest trying to make their first fire trap.” The thug rushes over to join the rest of the mages.

It takes awhile but with Nebel’s advice, and Rosa’s idea to start with two piece permanent spells first, the six of them mange to make a stone that lights up when another is touched. From there its just a little practice and a lot of mental depletion headaches before his assistant and the five military mages are able to start building the actual traps.

At first they struggled to make even one meter worth of fire trap an hour which was very slow compared to Nebel so he was forced to continue making them with them but after about six hours they could each make three an hour and Nebel decided to give himself a rest from production and work on his idea.

They had already made quite a few of the trap segments and Nebel was proud of the completed trap that was being laid out in the field in front of the tower but he knew the limitations of fire traps and even if he built the whole frontier worth of traps he would just have to do it again later.

His traps had the enormous flaw of only working in the day and that applied for all of his traps but the fire trap had its own special failing. Simply put, it would eventually burn out. Heat magic in its very nature would consume mass and so even if the power source of the traps was constant the trap would eventually be destroyed.

Luckily this wouldn’t happen in two or three uses it was more like a hundred but even so after one hundred of its timed daylight only activations it would need to be replaced.

Compared to vector traps the fire traps was much more energy efficient but while vectors would work on any enemy dumb enough to enter its field, fire traps were useless against many types of monstrous demi humans and the more animalistic creatures that had also been created.

As it was Nebel had ordered the trap layers to stagger the line to assure that the trapped enemy couldn’t simply run out the sides, no matter how long they were.

Other problems with this kind of trap was the clean up, the bodies would be left out in plain view unlike the vector trap he had killed so many goblins with, which threw them off of a cliff and the danger in using them… all it would take is someone using this kind of trap in a drought to possible burn down whole towns.

Of course the vector traps had their own issues. If an enemy weighed not so much more than a goblin or a rat man, then the amount of permanent spells needed to move them would skyrocket and the energy use would swiftly exceed solar powers limitations even with Nebel’s gatherer setup.

To fix some of these issues Nebel had thought of something simple, something everyone takes for granted… a battery.

The idea he had was to imagine a permanent spell gathering light from a large area, turning it into power and storing it until a preset permanent spell needed the juice.

The real problem was the magic type and the materials. He had no idea which ones would be better, should he gather raw magic or electricity? Should he use a real battery, just some rocks or some random object?

The problem with the magic type was he knew how electricity was stored but not how magic was stored, he knew raw magic permanent spell creation while he would have to go back to the academy to learn energy magic and the final spells would be using either raw magic or heat directly… he had no real way to know since he couldn’t see if the invisible solar panels were collecting light that it made into electricity, light it made into magic, the heat of the light, that it then gave to the trap or something else…

The problem was most likely… he didn’t know what magic was!

He needed more information if he wanted perfection but since he couldn’t get it he decided to just wing it. Nebel collects together a cheap glass prism a soldier let him have, an old battery from the depot and an obsolete antenna from the top of the tower that had apparently not been used for at least a decade.

He had decided to imagine solar panels spread out across an area, sending their energy to the antenna which is connect to the battery, the battery stores it and finally the prism converts it into whatever the trap needs.

His initial testing looked promising… even if the power gathered in a full day of light would only power one fire trap for a single night, Nebel calculates from connecting one to a fire trap that lacked its own energy collection. The trap stayed on but with an voltmeter borrowed from a technician, Nebel checked the battery and found no extra charge in it even though he saw it charging when the trap wasn’t connected.

Nebel tells the six diligent workers about his findings even though it wasn’t necessary in Rosa’s case since she was the one that hunted down most of the materials…

Also Nebel informs them not to try storing heat magic in a gas can since when he tried he barely managed to escape the explosion… Nebel spent ten minutes reflecting on his stupidity after that one.

…also stay away from heat magic in the battery… melted plastic and acid flying everywhere…

…magic in a bottle… the metal canister ruptured and flew around apparently the magic took the form of pressure…

…and wood… that one just burst into flames but it sure did surprise him…

The next few times the rat men came after the time he convinced the general were a learning experience, the first thing he learned was that the rat men were pretty swift at learning the second time they ran into his trap they ended up standing still and being pin cushioned by cross bowers but the third time they had already figured out the weakness of the sides and most of them survived.

It was after that that Nebel ordered them to stagger the placement.

The fourth time the rat men tried to leave through the sides but since the traps were already activated to both the left and right they fried… problem was the ones on the ends still managed to escape. The fifth time ironically was a better success then the fourth time. Since none of the rat men seemed to want to see where the end of the line was they instead stayed still in the center of the trap and made themselves into perfect targets.

After this point the trap had gotten long enough that the army didn’t even need to fight other than a little target practice and Nebel could be found, along with Rosa and the general sipping some tea and enjoying the sight…

The screams of rat men filling the air as they burned or turned into humanoid pin cushions… was like music to the weary human soldiers ears!

Nebel and Rosa stuck around for about an hour more before hitching a ride off to the west… Nebel wasn’t sure what he could do over there, he would just have to wait and see. As they leave the five army mages wave good bye from their work station, where they were now training over thirty mages that had arrived with that days supplies. The trip just like the last one was uneventful, Nebel was thinking of traps he could make and failing, while Rosa was doing her best to assist him by feeding him information on the area on the operation, their allies and the enemy at hand: Orcs.

Orcs were bigger, smarter and more vicious then the goblins and rat men, along with nearly double the height. They were also heavy and fire resistant… which of course was the main problem…

Nebel either needed to come up with some sort of trap that didn’t destroy the farmlands but killed the orcs or become a one man army and beat back the enemy all by himself…

i wasn't very inspired while writing this one for some reason must have been because of the time i got up... i'm sure i'll be more in the mood tomorrow.

I still hope you like it... i'm just not "Feeling it" right now