A.N. Read up to 6 chapters ahead of public release on P@treon, for just $5. I have an account by the same username: Fiction Guzzler
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The following weeks were a study in monothematic obsession. The dual-cast laser was a functional weapon, but it was imperfect. It was short-range, clumsy, and the strain of maintaining two separate, intricate constructs at once was a manageable yet significant drain on her developing conduit.
Before she could even consider replacing it, however, she had to master it. Pushing a concept to its absolute limits was the only way to truly understand its flaws.
So, she began the tedious process of refinement. Each night was dedicated to the same two-part process: generating the raw beam of light and shaping it with the invisible, magical lens. The work was a grind of incremental improvements. She focused on the stability of the lens first, practicing holding its perfect concave shape for minutes at a time until it became second nature.
With a more stable lens, the effective range of the beam began to increase. Three feet became four, then five. Each extra foot of coherence was a hard-won victory, paid for with hours of repetitive focus and the familiar, pounding headache that signaled the edge of her endurance. She strengthened the power output, turning the charred line on her wooden block into a deep, smouldering gouge.
After weeks of dedicated practice, she had perfected the technique as much as she could. The laser was stable, its range was a consistent six feet, and the strain of dual-casting, while still significant, was manageable. She had a reliable, short-range cutting tool.
And it was in perfecting it that she became acutely aware of its every limitation. It was a crutch. An elegant one, but a crutch nonetheless. The dual-casting required immense concentration, and the physical act of creating an external lens felt clumsy, an unnecessary step between intent and result. Her analytical mind could not tolerate the inefficiency. She knew there had to be a better way.
Only then did she return to the source, abandoning the external lens entirely. The ultimate goal remained unchanged: a single, seamless act of will producing a perfect beam.
She began again, projecting the raw beam and attempting to impose the complex, coherent structure upon it internally. The failures were numerous and frustrating. Sometimes the beam would refuse to form at all, the magic dissolving into a harmless, unfocused cloud. Other times, the construct would be unstable, flickering violently before collapsing with a painful backlash that sent a jolt up her arm.
Her analytical mind treated each failure not as a defeat, but as a data point. She began to think of it less as magic and more as a problem in fluid dynamics. She wasn't just releasing energy; she was shaping its flow through the conduit of her body. The internal structure she was trying to create was causing turbulence, a chaotic state that disrupted the coherence before the beam could even form.
The solution, she eventually hypothesized, was not to build a complex structure within the flow, but to shape the flow itself. She needed to create a magical equivalent of a shaped charge, using a specific, internally generated pressure wave to compress and collimate the light as it was being released. It was a far more elegant, and far more difficult, solution.
It was then, in the quiet frustration of another failed attempt with this new theory, that the true solution struck her. It was so simple, so absurdly obvious, that she almost laughed at her own overcomplication.
Put simply, she was making a silly mistake. All this time, she had been treating it as a multi-step process: first, willing raw, chaotic light into existence, and then trying to impose an intricate, and ultimately unnecessary, complex structure upon it to force its coherence. It was inefficient, like trying to build a castle by throwing sand at a wall and hoping it sticks in the right shape.
The real solution wasn't to refine the process; it was to change the base premise. She shouldn't be trying to turn light into a laser. She should just be making a laser from the start. Her control over her magic was absolute; her intent was the law. If she willed a 'laser'—a coherent, collimated beam of energy—into existence, the magic would obey that specific, final instruction, bypassing the clumsy intermediate steps entirely.
The night she finally succeeded was a quiet, almost anticlimactic affair. She extended her finger, and this time, she didn't think about pressure, or flow, or internal constructs. She simply focused her entire will on a single, final command: Laser.
A silent, needle-thin line of pure indigo shot out, striking the toy block on her shelf. It didn't just char the wood; it bored a clean, narrow hole straight through it before dissipating against the far wall.
She held the beam for a full ten seconds, perfectly stable. She tested the range. Five feet. Six. At seven, it finally began to lose cohesion. It wasn't a dramatic increase in range over the lens method, but it was achieved with a single, unified act of will. The strain on her body was immense—the headache began almost instantly—but it was the strain of a single, complex task, not the fractured effort of dual-casting. That alone was proof she was on the right path.
It was a significant improvement, but she recognized her current limits. She knew she could push this even further, moving away from the visible spectrum to the higher-energy end, like X-rays or UV. Those could do far more damage, but they were currently out of her reach.
Even with her knowledge of physics, she needed more detailed information before she could attempt to replicate them. It wasn't that she couldn't do it, theoretically. She had already seen that when she didn't know how to do something, her magic sometimes filled in the gaps if she poured in more power.
But that would be far less efficient, not to mention dangerous. Ionizing lasers of that level were inherently hazardous. Her body could barely manage the strain of a simple visible light laser; pushing beyond that now would be foolish.
For now, the logical next step was to strengthen her body so she could come back to it in the future. In the meantime, she would apply the same scientific rigor to her other foundational skill. Her focus shifted from light to force. Telekinesis.
Her previous work had been about endurance and multi-object control. Now, it was time to explore its tactical applications, starting with defense. The concept of a shield was simple, but a crude, flat wall of force was inefficient, absorbing the full kinetic energy of an impact and transferring the shock directly to her. A more effective design, she reasoned, would be a concave, multi-layered field designed to deflect energy rather than absorb it.
The theory was sound, but testing it was another matter. She couldn't very well test its efficacy against high-velocity threats in her bedroom. All she could do was throw objects at it herself—pencils, books, a cricket ball she found in the garden. She launched them with as much telekinetic force as she could muster. The shield worked, deflecting them easily, but she knew this was a woefully inadequate measure of its true strength. It was okay-ish, a proof-of-concept that held up against low-energy physical impacts, but how it would fare against something truly dangerous, like a bullet, or maybe a spell, was a complete unknown. The uncertainty was a galling, unresolved variable in her strategic planning.
With the defensive theory established, if not truly tested, she moved on to offense. Simple telekinetic shoves were crude; true lethality lay in precision and velocity. She started with a stack of old pennies on her desk. A simple mental push sent the first one wobbling across the room to clatter harmlessly against the wall.
She analysed the failure. The force was being applied unevenly. She needed to create a perfectly contained kinetic event. She tried again, but this time she didn't just push the coin. She envisioned a pocket of focused, directional pressure forming directly behind it, expanding in a controlled, explosive burst.
The result was dramatically different. There was a sharp crack as the air was displaced, and the penny shot across the room in a blur. It didn't just hit the wall; it embedded itself half an inch deep into the plaster, leaving a small, copper-rimmed hole.
This was progress. This was a weapon. She spent some time practicing, firing pennies into a thick old textbook, refining her aim and learning to control the power of the kinetic burst. The quiet thwump of copper embedding in paper became the steady rhythm of her work, each impact a testament to her growing mastery.
But even this, she realized, was an indirect application. A projectile was a delivery system for kinetic force, a secondary tool. Why deliver the force via a medium when she could apply it directly? The most efficient, and therefore most lethal, application of telekinesis was not to move objects, but to exert irresistible force upon the target itself.
She began practicing on inanimate objects. A simple disarming maneuver was the first step. She'd practice on her father's discarded newspaper, suddenly wrenching it from the coffee table with a violent, irresistible twist. Then she moved outside to the garden. She focused on a thick, low-hanging branch of the oak tree. She didn't push or pull it. Instead, she applied two distinct, opposing points of rotational force along its length.
There was a low groaning sound as wood fibers began to strain and tear. She increased the pressure, her focus narrowing, and with a sharp, sickening CRACK, the branch twisted and snapped clean off, falling to the grass below.
She stared at the clean break, her expression unreadable. There was no revulsion, no flicker of horror. There was only a cold, clinical assessment of the result. That was the force required to snap seasoned oak. The force required to snap the bone in the neck would be considerably less.
This was true lethality. A broken arm to neutralize a threat. A twisted neck to eliminate one.
It was her most versatile and terrifyingly efficient weapon yet.