Saintess Summons Skeletons

Chapter 868 - Think inside the box

Sofia had a realization looking at the page. The spacing between the words, the clean alignment of the letters, in the negative spaces, she could see them, triangles.

That, by itself, would barely get anyone to raise an eyebrow, but for Sofia, who had experienced similar shenanigans before, it was like she was struck by lightning.

That’s it! It’s there! Triangular ritual circle?! Ritual triangle?! It’s her! It has to be!

Carefully sending a trickle of mana into the thin, yellowed paper page, Sofia made it run along the triangles she could barely make out in between the lines. Making mana flow precisely at such sharp angles without destroying the old paper wasn’t easy but at her level it was already something she could do with just a bit of focus.

A familiar scene occurred. Sofia watched the words move and the letters warp, as she felt the ritual she had just activated spread throughout the entire book.

The introduction in the first page had changed, and the new text began with the real title and author of the book.

‘Ups and Downs of Angular Magic, With Love, By Anna’

“I knew it!” Sofia exclaimed, turning to look at Saria only to notice that her sister was already behind her chair, hunched over her shoulder.

“That’s certainly quite the find. Ah, can you believe I had this in a random storage room buried under a mountain of novels for the better half of a decade?”

Sofia looked back at her sister, then at the multiple rings on her fingers, her eyes narrowing.

“You wouldn’t happen to be wearing a gold ring that’s unexpectedly impossible to identify as well, right?”

Saria raised an eyebrow at the question, then quickly guessed, “It’s about the saint set?” she asked, “Sorry but no such thing, no. Do you think you wouldn’t know if I had an interesting thing like that? A gold ring that you can’t identify… I can issue a bounty for that at the sect if you want. Something like a thousand gold as a reward would certainly keep everyone on the lookout.”

“Sure, thanks. I was going to start seriously looking for it soon anyway.”

“Any other detail on what it looks like?”

“No, just a gold ring that’s hard to identify. Could be literally anywhere.”

“Your chances of finding that one aren’t looking good, sis. But I’ll issue the bounty anyway. Better than nothing. Now can you get it on with the reading?!”

Sofia chuckled, casually turning the page.

The book was different now, but in the same journaling style, of Anna documenting her trials and errors on converting her usual spells to angular magic. It never went into any details on her personal life, focusing entirely on the magic aspect, which she obviously had a powerful innate control over, but seemed to be lacking a deep understanding in.

As one would expect from the goddess of mana, her progress in her research was astonishingly fast. And although she only vaguely described the spells she created over her tests, it could be guessed that they numbered in the tens of thousands.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, she had already come to a few conclusions.

‘I always wondered, since my flat rune is just a triangle in a square in a circle, why is it that everyone is so obsessed with the circle? And that includes me, I instinctively fell into the same pitfall, somehow, and to this day almost all of my creations are circle-based. But now that I have toyed with the subject for a while, the answer is clear as day.

Angular magic demands a lot more focus from the caster, is much harder to channel, and inflicts much–MUCH greater backlash, it’s just not suited for the quick and easy reflex-like casting you want be it in battle or in general life. It’s also hard to quickly switch from one magic style to the other in a pinch, it’s no issue for me but everyone else seems to struggle with it. The flow of their mana becomes unstable if they try to alternate styles in quick succession.

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That being said, it is not without its upsides. With good control, an angular spell can be in multiple states at once, square casting being best for sequential states, and triangular for random states. Offensively speaking, this is absolutely crazy. All of a sudden, countering the spell means trying to negate all states at once, predicting the incoming blow means accounting for all the different states. Not only that, but square spells have better speed and triangular ones have better mana-efficiency as a baseline!

Angular spells are awful at targeting, however. Which is a bit of a sore point. Offensively they are best used as straight shots or area attacks and not much else. In comparison, they stand out defensively, making it much simpler to create adaptive shields and protection that automatically reacts to incoming threats. It’s just that a passive loadout like that would tear apart the average mage’s body before they could do much. Perhaps it’s best-suited for us gods… Or ghosts, I guess? If a ghost trained to use physical only angular passive magic…’

That was where the interesting part stopped, Anna then spending several pages trying and failing to teach a ghost an adaptive elemental immunity spell.

Generally, it seemed that angular magic was a lot harder to use, but as Anna noted, it had its upside, and perhaps the one that interested Sofia the most was something she only mentioned a bit later. Apparently with angular magic, square casting in particular, it was possible to switch from channeling one spell to another mid-way through. So a square style mage could use feints or make a strategic pivot without wasting any casting style if the one they were preparing no longer suited the situation.

Either way, it was much too late for Sofia or Saria to start converting to square casting, but when it came to what they were originally studying for, it was worth considering.

Enchanting my arm with an effect that is generally a bit weaker but can adapt to different situations by itself doesn’t sound too bad. Though designing a square enchantment from scratch sounds like a bit of a headache.

Keeping her thoughts to herself for now, Sofia kept flipping the pages.

Toward the very end, Anna wrote a few lines about ‘the strengthening framework’, the only paragraph really mentioning anything else than her direct research.

‘It was a difficult decision, but the strengthening framework I have been planning for a while will have to use the more popular circular magic almost exclusively. Angular magic simply isn’t a good fit for the weaker races, and they are the ones meant to benefit the most from the framework. It pains me, after all this work, to doom this alternative magic style to obscurity for thousands of years to come, but the goal comes first. This is too much pressure… Lina found a grey hair on my head the other day… I should take a break for a bit… Maybe I’ll take a few days off to make myself some angels like they have in the otherworlds stories. Wouldn’t it be nice to have people under me I can trust? I know! I’ll try to make them with angular magic! This is gonna be fun!’

“So that’s it,” Saria said from behind Sofia, “the reason why the angels look so fucky, they’re actually using angular spells. No wonder they always look like they’re everywhere all at once. Turns out they actually kind of are. Since they’re made entirely of mana.”

Sofia nodded along, “I remember Kyle using similar magic too when he absorbed Aphenoreth’s essence into my mana heart. Turns out it was just angular casting. I suppose it’s not strange a Seraph would know a lot about it.”

“Well, that was an interesting read. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you here a bit.”

“Going back to the sect?” Sofia asked.

“Yeah. I gotta check my storeroom again. I don’t get how a system admin’s books ended up being sold to the sect like that, but if we had two then we might just have more. I’ll rush there so come pick me up in Zangdar tomorrow.”

“Sure, I’ll check every few hours.”

With a quick nod, Saria left.

Sofia safely stored the precious book in her eye, and stood up to pick another stack of books to read. It was a bit harder to know which books to read in what order from this point on, but she decided to get through the ones she had gotten from Zerei for a start, as that was probably a decent starting point.

Only moments before she sat back down and started reading again, she felt a faint tug on her soul.

Oh? You’re done? Coast’s clear here you can come.

Teleporting to her, Pareth appeared in the library, a disheveled, passed-out princess in his arms.

“Oooh, her mana progressed a lot. Ninety-nine already?”

Pareth nodded, then looked around, seemingly looking for a place to put Beatrice down. He was not surprised in the slightest by the library or curious about the palace, as he had been regularly checking in through Sofia’s eyes for the last few days while helping the princess level up.

Sofia pulled her out of Pareth’s arms with her aura, “You can leave her to me, good work out there. Oh right, Elsep was looking for you earlier, didn’t say why but you might want to go check. How was the leveling otherwise, did she do well?”

Pareth answered with a few gestures, and the two chatted like this for a few minutes before he left, leaving Beatrice with Sofia.

“Looks like she needs a shower.”

Placing Beatrice down on her chair, Sofia sprayed her face with a bit of purified philosopher stone’s water.

“Good morning, Beatrice,” Sofia greeted with a smirk, “feeling stronger?”