Alyssa felt her skepticism rising as Oliver babbled on with technical details, pretty deep in his head about so many things that he was quite confident on. At the moment, she was just glad he seemed to be doing...
Better might not be the right word. But he was responsive now. And probably not in shock?
Hopefully, he'd calm down at some point, he'd figure out whatever hangup was causing his spell to futz out, and then they could work on actually getting towards civilization. Yeah, they were definitely in pretty deep wilderness, which was unusual, but that didn't mean they were alone on the entire world.
They couldn't be, not really. Sure, she didn't know all of the fiddly little details about how Forerunner Expeditions worked, but she had paid enough attention to know the basics, enough to know that this world couldn't be truly uninhabited.
All across the cosmos, people were dealing with calamities, cataclysms, apocalypses, armageddons, whatever. They would cry out desperately for a savior, someone to swoop in out of nowhere to solve all of their problems. Then, if the conditions were just right, if they performed the right rituals, if their Tyrants were feeling either magnanimous or personally threatened, then magic stuff would happen and some poor sucker somewhere would be scooped up in a phenomenal tide of magic and dumped in the middle of a huge problem that they'd be told was their duty to fix.
It was a rough deal all around.
The Forerunner Expeditions hijacked that process, sending a crack team of high-level elite trained professionals, loaded to the gills with gear and experience in the place of a random teenager with a penchant for murder. They'd then solve the problem in record time, gain the loyalty of the populace, topple the world's Tyrants, and speedrun technological uplifting until they could create a portal home, giving the Empire of Humanity a new territory.
It was clean, efficient, saved a ton of lives, and allowed the Empire to expand to somewhere that actively wanted their intervention, thereby nipping all complaints about 'unethical conquest' in the bud.
It was super effective and super bulletproof, but given how he'd been acting she couldn't just tell Oliver that he was wrong, so she'd need to take a softer approach. "How sure are you? You were complaining about the mana, it's not just that?"
"I'm pretty sure. Maybe... eighty to ninety percent chance of no meaningful technological advancement, seventy to eighty of there being no civilization, and about one in three of there being no intelligent species at all. Civilized species I mean." he frowned, "Wendals and humans and elves, that kind of intelligent. There's obviously animal species, which are intelligent. And there might be something like pseudodragons or crows, just nothing with a big impact."
"And what's the trigger? You know, the Jump Nucleus?"
"You mean the-"
"Probably. I don't need the name, I need an answer."
"I don't know," Oliver frowned, "Perhaps there was one eons ago, or perhaps it's a very subtle one... but no, that wouldn't make sense. Subtle calamities don't create the right conditions for Allosmos. But it could be divination-resistant?"
"Can't you check?" Alyssa cut in before he could spiral back into nonsense muttering.
"Not without better tech. This... generally isn't an issue? If something has lost enough Fate for the world to take notice, it shows up really loudly in Identify World, but there wasn't anything..."
Alyssa tapped her chin. Well. This certainly wasn't going well. She knew that somewhere in the world, something was going very wrong, but clearly they'd landed really far off-target. And Ranger or not, she sure as hell didn't want to spend the rest of her life living in the wilderness. She'd signed up because the idea of being isekai'd, of being a heroic savior of an entire world, being treated like royalty and getting awesome magical powers had appealed to her, not sleeping under a bush and eating campfire-cooked meat for the rest of her natural life.
And maybe he was just entirely wrong! That was possible, even likely. Sure, he was an Archmage in his early twenties, but he was also in his early twenties, a recent graduate and definitely the one of their five-man group with the least real world experience. That much was pretty obvious, with how much less intimidating and mysterious he looked with his arms wrapped around his legs in worry compared to just a couple of hours ago, when he'd been all tattooed and wearing grand wizardy clothing. She was way more willing to believe this guy could make a mistake, especially given how unsure he looked.
And in any case, if he was right... well, what would they do? She didn't know the details of how the portal was made - that was Oliver's job as their Artificer. She just knew it took hundreds of people and years of work. Expeditions would easily last a decade or more, and most of that was dedicated to the construction, she knew. So with no assistance...
"Well!" She clapped her hands together. That wasn't her job to worry about. It was Henrietta and Oliver who needed to take care of that. She was just a Ranger, and right now they were lost in unfriendly territory. She just needed to get Oliver to stop moping and start moving. "I guess we better get started."
"Get started on what?"
"Building a portal, of course! I was in the same classes as you, I know you were taught how to make one even starting from Bronze Age technology."
"Yeah, and that's still better than literally nothing. Where... how... I don't know where you'd even start."
"First step of survival is building or finding a shelter," she mused, "So that's step one of portal-building too."
Oliver looked at her like she'd been struck by lightning, "What? Are you crazy? Finding a log to hide under is nowhere close to building a portal!"
"But it's closer than we are right now," Alyssa impatiently insisted. If she had to drag her teammate around she would, but that would be brutal on her already-thin mood, "Which means it's a step in the right direction. We find somewhere good to shelter, we build a fire, secure water, find food, make some weapons, and go from there. Henrietta will probably have found us by then, and that'll just make it easier."
"Go from there? How do we get from 'build a fire' to 'build a portal?'"
"Ah, see," Alyssa snapped her fingers and pointed at him, plastering a grin on her face that was way more enthusiastic than she actually felt, "That's your job. My job is just to keep you alive, so to a shelter we a-go! Besides, you knew you'd be working with weird tools. You even said as much in that stupid get-to-know-you meeting a couple weeks ago."
"I said I wanted to work with novel magic, not use weird tools," he hissed, then sighed. "I wanted a smithy at least. I'm just... useless without some baseline tech."
"And how hard is a smithy to make, really?" Oh good, she had him. Or almost did, anyway. "Just a bit of metal, a bit of fire, and you know how to make both of those."
"That's... not the same. I just... I don't, I can't. A proper smithy needs too much magic, too much tech, too many skills that we just don't have."
"You signed up to fight a demon lord, but you admit defeat at the idea of making an anvil? Forges weren't always high-tech and you knew there wouldn't be any [Architect]s when you signed up. Come on, let's get going."
Oliver finally seemed to consider her words, and he pulled himself to his feet. "Fine. So, do you have a plan for where we're going?"
"Eh, close enough." She'd spotted a creek feeding into the ocean while she'd been out hunting for leaves. There was bound to be something upstream of that which would work for their shelter. It wouldn't be that hard.
Alyssa had underestimated how hard moving around in the wilderness would be.
Not for her, of course. She was a [Ranger of Far Lands] and proud of it. Even with nothing but a level one [Leafstep] and her base stats, she could easily navigate through the densest woodlands, albeit not at the fastest pace. She was a long ways off from running across thin branches and leaping across vast chasms like she used to be able to do.
But compared to Oliver, she might as well be a max-level [Soaring Messenger]. She'd even gone ahead of him multiple times, and had found a good candidate for their shelter not too far from here on her last trek. He just needed to stop moving as fast as a tortoise stuck in molasses.
Or maybe even that's giving him too much credit, she privately bemoaned as he so, so slowly pulled himself over a log. Off to the side, a critter that looked like a buffalo with a massive mane of blue fur idly chewed on some plants with what she was certain was bemusement.
It was somewhat novel, being this close to wildlife with no real reaction. Sure, she'd spent some time as a [Friend of Wild Things] during her training, but she hadn't gotten [Beast Empathy] to a high enough level to keep as a cross-class skill and as such wasn't terribly used to the sensation.
It would make hunting pretty easy, at least. And she knew how to act as part of the ecosystem to avoid annoying creatures that otherwise didn't care about her.
Oliver dropped to the other side of the log after an unbearable amount of time spent preparing for it, and immediately put his foot in a puddle of mud, sinking a bit past his ankle. Then, instead of calmly removing it and carrying on like a normal person, he panicked, flailed, and faceplanted the rest of the way into the creek with a splash, covering himself entirely in muck.
She sighed and hopped down, yanking him upright before he could drown. Doing so left half his leaf in the mud, and the other half fell off a moment later, leaving him exposed. He squawked with embarrassment and tried to pull the shreds of his leaf into a halfway-decent covering. In lieu of watching him struggle for even more time to try and dress himself with nowhere near the right kinds of material, she just grabbed his arm and started pulling him along. It had been a long day, and she was getting too tired for his nonsense.
"Come on, keep moving. Worry about how you look once we stop. We're almost there, and you can clean up then."
He spluttered something indignant, but Alyssa wasn't even really listening at this point. It had been a very, very long day, and she was really feeling the limits of her stamina. It didn't matter if the surroundings were just as bright as they'd been hours ago, she was still able to get tired, and had been exerting herself heavily all day. Oliver struggled in her grip, but she couldn't afford to get distracted by his discomfort right now; she just needed to get this done.
"Ow, ow, ow!" Oliver's voice grew more insistent, and she looked down at the artificer in her grip.
Oh, ah… his wrist probably shouldn't be at that angle. She might have underestimated just how effective her base three Strength was against someone with essentially no physical stats. The tiredness she was feeling momentarily fled and she dropped Oliver instinctively, which may have been a bad choice as he thudded to the ground and his hand painfully impacted a thorn-covered vine, embedding it in the back of his hand.
"Ah! I'm sorry!" she blurted out, then started to bend down to help him only to freeze, then move again, and freeze again. If she moved too fast, then her clothes might tear themselves off, and she couldn't stand that, but she couldn't just leave her teammate lying on the ground in pain.
While she was stuck in indecision, Oliver picked himself up off the ground, cradling his lightly bleeding hand. On the bright side, it looked a bit less discolored than it had a moment ago, but it was still bleeding.
"Was that really necessary?" Oliver asked, voice strained.
"I didn't mean to!" she defended herself, "But you were just so slow and we're almost there. You can walk, right? Good, let's go."
"Do you know any healing?"
Alyssa picked up the pace a bit more, trying to pretend she didn't hear him, "Look, it's right there!"
"So you didn't need to hurt me to get us there thirty seconds sooner?"
"Everything is fine! Come on, come on."
The shelter she'd found was turning out to be even better than she'd thought when she'd first seen it. It was tucked away underneath a massive cliff of red stone, a stone archway easily ten, fifteen feet wide situated between a clear pond and a shallow, rocky creek feeding into said pond. There was also a small waterfall feeding into the pond, reachable via a thin rocky ledge, but it was barely a trickle and mostly just produced a fine spray of mist.
What made it really great was not only that they'd have something over their heads, but they had a ready source of clean water and food, as the pond was practically teeming with all kinds of fish. The Jungle was primarily on one side of the creek, so there was no need to clear out any greenery from where they huddled.
And despite how great it was, Oliver still wasn't happy. Instead, he just sulked near the back wall of the archway, moping on a chair-sized outcropping by cradling his hand in a way that Alyssa felt was overkill while simultaneously trying to keep himself covered. Not that she cared.
She'd pushed through her encroaching exhaustion to gather up a bunch of deadwood from the surroundings, handfuls of dry leaves and some very dry moss from the cliff face, then pile it all up in an attempted campfire. The problem was, she was having no luck getting a fire started. Apparently, all the time she'd spent brushing up on primitive fire-starting methods had been too optimistic, because it had been focused on working with a flint and steel.
She swore as the stick she was trying to spin in her fire drill shattered, a sudden crack the only warning she had before the entire thing disintegrated in her hands. Her hand would have ended up full of splinters were it not for her stats, but her patience broke at the same time as the twig.
She glared at Oliver, who was hiding a laugh at her struggles, daring him to say something. When he didn't, she did instead. "Why are you just sitting there? You're a mage. Snap your fingers and get a fire going, you've gotten your fun in."
"What?"
"Fire! Whoosh!" she flicked her wrist at the pile of sticks, "I know you can make it, so do that and get us set up. I know how spells work, I know that making fire is one of the simplest spells out there, so freaking do it!"
"No. You mangled my hand-"
"Oh, that's how it is? I didn't mangle it, that's a scratch and a sprain at worst. Stop being such a wimp, you useless know-it-all!" she was shouting now.
"But even if you hadn't," he continued, "My skill doesn't work like that. I need a focus to cast, and there aren't any of those on this entire world."
Alyssa wasn't buying it, "You didn't need a focus to cast your spell that said we were alone. So which is it?"
"That's different," Oliver dismissed her, "I can't enact change without tools. I can copy patterns, but there's no patterns to copy over."
"What, do you need me to pile a bunch of sticks up and mime lighting it or something? Give you a 'pattern' to work with? Would it please you to have me acting like a fool before you'll deign to let yourself do anything useful?"
"I don't know how or what to do to light a fire. That's your role. Mine is to get us home," he said smugly, "But I can try thinking about how we can do something?"
'Something to make you less useless' went unsaid, but Alyssa wasn't about to let that sort of technicality slide. "I'm not useless, you're useless! I can light a fire, and I don't need your stupid help to do it!"
She threw what remained of her fire drill down with a glare, as though daring it to catch on fire under her burning gaze, but didn't manage to do anything besides scatter much of the timber she'd gathered into the pond in a series of splashes.
"This is your fault!" she spun on Oliver, "If you weren't entirely useless, we'd already be on our way to civilization and this wouldn't even be needed."
"My fault? How in the hells is-" he kept going, but Alyssa wasn't listening as she stormed off into the foliage.
"You stay there and just be useless! Someone needs to keep us alive, and it won't be you."
Alyssa was so mad that she could barely pick up fresh pieces of timber, her vision swimming and her hands shaking so badly as she drunkenly stumbled through the woods that she had to sit down, resting her head against a tree to recover.
"Stupid world. Stupid Oliver. Stupid magic," she grumbled, then yawned. "Stupid level 0."
Her eyes fluttered slightly, and settled half-closed. Then she closed them for a second, because the darkness was comfortable.
Well. I suppose it doesn't matter that much. I can get Oliver's help and then prove that I definitely can cast, it's just the fault of the world. Stupid Jump. This wouldn't be a problem if we'd kept even half our gear. Or half our levels. Why did I have to lose all my awesome skills and powers? We're supposed to get cool new magic, not get everything we've worked for our entire lives to be stripped away in an instant.
Something tickled her nose, and Alyssa opened her eyes to see a bird with four wings of brilliant red feathers perched on a bush not far from her head. "Where did you come from?" she wondered out loud, "But you agree with me, right birdie? Oliver's just being useless."
She yawned, "Stupid Artificer, can't do anything the moment something goes even a bit wrong, shuts down as soon as something doesn't go juuust right. I bet he never had to make do with nothing but a survival kit for a month in deep woods. Doesn't know how good he has it, hmph."
The bird flew off.
"You know I'm right!" she called after it, then relaxed back into the tree, tracing its bark and magic with her fingers. Tactile mana sense was the way to go, it was just so much more precise, so much better than any of the other options. To ground herself, she felt around the tree, peeling back its history with her fingers, picking at its magical scars as a way to keep her mind and fingers busy.
The tree felt weird, though it took her a minute to figure out why. But once she did figure it out, it was so obvious. It just didn't have… anything? Normally, when she felt a plant she could get a sense of its history, what it had experienced in its life, who had interacted with it and what forces had guided it. Usually, there was an element of intelligence involved in some form or another, the slight rumblings of a group that passed by days or weeks prior, the distant warmth of magics supporting the formation of wild habitats, but here there was none of that.
It was just... a plant. Sure, she could pick up on some interesting tidbits, like its bark having a faint brush of Poison and that there was a bunch of small animals which called it home. But that was it. All of its most interesting interactions were with animals, other than a surprisingly strong echo of what she guessed was a storm knocking down a bunch of its peers but leaving it to grow big and strong. There was plenty in the tree's magic that she didn't understand, but there was none of what she was properly looking for.
Sure, industry left the deepest marks, but powerful individuals could send awe rippling through their surroundings simply by walking past. That wasn't even touching on the ways in which distant magery could subtly warp the course of growth over time, or even the effect something as simple as someone naming a tree or the region it was in could have on their magic.
She wasn't a scholar, but she knew her trees. And maybe… maybe Oliver really was right? Maybe they were all alone?
No, that's crazy. They're just really far away. We'll find them eventually.
Still, that was an understandable mistake to make, and with her head a bit clearer... she supposed she could cut Oliver a bit of slack. But he had also insulted her and called her a loser. So no. She would just sit here, feeling a tree, and wait for him to come find her… and probably get lost in the woods, because he was a useless nerd who couldn't even handle a couple drops of blood. He should count himself lucky that they'd been dropped in the wilderness, and weren't already fighting through hordes of demons. Seriously. How would he have handled that?
She grumbled to herself. Well, what kind of person did that make her if she was going to leave him alone?
Still, it was enough that she finally picked herself up and picked up her timber from where it had scattered across the ground. Her eyes were a bit bleary, but rubbing them cleared out the sleep, and she made it back to the camp without further incident.
Her footfalls on the loose rocks approaching the campsite jolted Oliver awake, who was dozing against a smooth-ish patch of rock.
"Oh! You're back," he said with a yawn, "How long was it?"
Not long? She thought. Had he fallen asleep that quickly? They were in unknown territory, he shouldn't be sleeping without a… Oh.
She paused to hide her embarrassment, both at the thought she'd just had and how she'd been acting before her nap. Her hesitancy must have been obvious to Oliver, because instead of waiting for a response any longer, he just started talking.
"I was thinking about what you said, before I fell asleep anyway, and I think your idea might just work," He paused. "Your class is Wood-based, right? I assumed that it was, but if it isn't then I need to restart my work and...."
"I'm Wood, Force, and Air," she confirmed.
"Okay. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not entirely certain if this will work. And you said you wanted to get a fire started on your own, and I didn't want to intrude in case you didn't want this, but I-"
"It's fine," she stopped him with a sigh, "Just... what's your idea?"
"So. It's really not a great plan, and I don't know if it's going to work because I've never done this with spoken words, but the theory checks out in terms of how it can all fit together. But because it's just starting a fire, if it were to ever work then-"
"Oliver," she cut him off. Fresh off a nap or no, she didn't have the energy for this. "Get to the point. What is your idea."
"You know how casting works, right?"
She shrugged, "I finished primary school."
"You learned that in primary school?" he asked, apparently surprised. "Wow. I didn't until I was in college. So how's your Magespeech? How many tongues do you know?"
Alyssa suddenly got the impression the two of them were talking about very different things. She'd learned 'how casting works' in the 'mages swish around mana to change the world' sense, and stuff like how to 'cast' with things like a firestarting trinket. Shoot. How do I get out of this one?
"Uhhh.... Limited?"
"Okay, I was just checking. I didn't think I really learned any of the lingo until college, but that was ages ago and I didn't know if that was normally just a teenager thing. Or a primary school thing, apparently."
"Definitely not a teenager thing," she replied with some degree of incredulity.
"That's fine then. But you know how chants work?"
Was he being deliberately obtuse? "I told you, I have cast before."
"Ah, okay. Good. This might need a bit of modification, but could you try 'Ecliathaishalmisan tu gesthili castrahl tesecal' for me?"
That... was a proper incantation. Short, perhaps, but still a proper spell-chant. Alright then. Time to deflect and figure out what she needed to do. "Could you explain what your big idea is first?"
"Oh," he blinked at her. "I'm going to use you as my focus."
"I'm sorry, what?"
"My focus. I thought you said you've cast before?"
"That is not the part I have questions about."
Oliver stared at her. "A focus is a tool utilized to manipulate threads of mana, to either supplement or supplant the need for a casting skill."
"No, what do you mean, you're going to use me?"
"Oh! Okay," he looked relieved for a moment. "My casting skill, [Scrollcast]. It's designed to work with books and scrolls, mostly, picking up on the impressions they make in the Tapestry and combining and twisting them into an active spell effect under my guidance. But I don't have any scrolls. However, I think I can also make it work with you as my focus. Because you're Wood-attuned, if you can establish some of the right patterns in the Wood mana in yourself and the Tapestry with a half-spell, I can then take that pattern and [Scrollcast] it into actually starting a fire. It's tricky, because neither of us really has everything we need on our own to cast, but together we probably do? I'm improvising a lot, but it's ritual casting, basically."
"So wait, I'm casting the spell and you're... copying it? Why can't I just cast it myself?"
"You said you didn't know how to cast a fire-making spell?"
"Sure... but if I know the incantation and you show me the motions I need to do, isn't it just that plus shoving my mana at something while really wanting it?"
That seemed to leave Oliver at a bit of a loss, and he started to say something a couple of times before quieting down. "Okay, so you don't know how magic works."
"Excuse you, I do!"
"And have you used anything more complicated than a skill? Because that's how you use a skill, but actual casting is more complicated."
"I... have."
Oliver just stared at her.
"It was a while ago?"
He sighed, "Whatever. But no, intent doesn't matter to casting. It does to skills, because skills are a part of you. If we want to get technical, it doesn't really matter to the skills either, but also kind of does. Skills are magic on easy-mode, and enable some truly amazing stunts of magic that would be entirely impossible without the abstraction layer they provide. But actual casting is a matter of plucking the threads of the Tapestry, influencing dozens of distinct magical elements as appropriate to enact change upon other portions of existence. That's usually accomplished by combining many separate influences upon the mana to make the pattern you want appear. Traditionally, mages would do so through the combination of the 'casting' gestures and incantations, an appropriate focus, and carefully controlling their environment. Casting skills are those which primarily interact with mana, rather than innately enacting change on the surroundings. So I'm going to use one while treating you as my focus to try and twist the threads of mana around here into starting a fire. Specifically, to..."
"Okay, okay. Okay," Alyssa finally managed to cut him off, "I get it. You need me to do the swooshy with my Wood-aligned soul, because you're trying to do Wood magic, and that helps you... with your casting."
"...I was getting there," Oliver pouted.
"It's alright, I really don't need the details. I get it well enough."
"What's your arcanoception form? You... do have a properly developed mana sense, right? I don't know how much you know, and people always seem to know less than I expect so I just want to make sure that-"
"I use touch. Wasn't a mana sense a base requirement for high school?"
He shrugged, "I don't know. But tactile works out great. I'm a lot better at incantations than gestures, so you won't need my help. Now, in case you forgot. Ecliathaishalmisan tu gesthili castrahl tesecal."
"Eccilethaish.... I messed it up, didn't I?"
Oliver sighed, "Yeah. Okay, start from the top."
Alyssa took a steadying breath and began again. "Ecliathaishalmisan tu gesthili castrahl tesecal."
It had taken her quite a few attempts to line everything up. The right cadence, the right stress, tone, pronunciation... all of it was important, and all of it needed to be done with incredible precision. It wasn't doing anything yet, because she still needed to feel out the right motions to accompany the words, and because even then Oliver would need to do his own magic, but as she finished the incantation, she felt a faint flicker in her soul, her fingertips slightly warming up as though held next to a candle.
"Your grammar was right. That's good. Did you feel anything?" Oliver asked, and Alyssa nodded but closed her eyes. "Excellent. Remember, you're trying to awaken the flame hiding inside the wood. You should be able to feel it if you're doing it right."
Alyssa ignored him, and repeated the chant. This time, she swung her hands back and forth, feeling out the ways the mana in her fingers twitched and pulled with the movement. Some ways, it felt like dragging them through water, other ways like holding her hand out of a moving vehicle, or of digging through the soil or carving letters into a tree branch or getting a splinter, and others... felt like holding her fingers a bit too close to a campfire.
Those were the ones she followed.
Each repetition required a slightly different motion to replicate the same feeling, as the magic naturally ebbed and flowed around her. But she was getting better at chasing down the feeling, figuring out the kinds of actions she needed to pursue to get closer to that campfire feeling. The Force in her also stirred to her motions, of course, but she didn't worry about that.
After a while, she had the general motion down. She needed to start before her chant with her hands clasped together in front of her sternum, then slide her hands up her arms and across her shoulders, up her neck, and across her face until it reached her mouth, at which point she would grab a 'seed' of sorts being produced by her voice, which she could then 'plant' in something in front of her.
Not that anything happened when she did so.
"I think you've got it," Oliver said as she finished one practice run. "Are you ready to give it a try?"
Alyssa paused for a moment to center herself and catch her breath, then nodded.
"Okay. On my mark. One, two, three, go."
"Ecliathaishalmisan tu gesthili castrahl tesecal," she moved with purpose, her fingers twitching in the right ways and her steps landing in the right cadence. Behind her, she vaguely heard Oliver saying something of his own, and she finished the chant by laying two fingers on the wood she was attempting to ignite.
Nothing happened.
"Oops! Sorry," Oliver blurted out, "That one was my fault. Okay, try this again?"
"Ecliathaishalmisan tu gesthili castrahl tesecal," her hands moved cleanly and smoothly, her feet stepping as was needed. Still no response.
"Hmm. Could you try geshthili instead of gesthili?"
"Geshtheilella," Alyssa frowned. "Geshthlll. Geshthilly. Geshthili. Tongue-twister. Are you sure?"
"No?" Oliver shrugged. "I've never done this before, but third time's the charm?"
Third time was not, in fact, the charm. It took nearly a dozen more tries with Oliver before anything happened. Then, everything happened all at once. The mana twisted into a seed and planted itself in the pile of tinder, her soul jolted, there was a flash of light.
[Ignite]
And then there was fire.