Chapter 185: Spellbreaking

…

lnside the Test room, Nasst began his explanation.

"Well, I know that I made this whole thing sound pretty exciting but you should understand that it's mostly going to be endless practice after you get the basic gist of it all," he smiled wryly.

"Alright," Evin agreed, even though he dreaded the idea quite a bit.

'But since it's the last thing I'll be doing before my vacation, I'll just get it over with as soon as possible…' he thought resolutely. Truthfully, although Evin needed to visit his family and do some other things, he also just wanted a little break before he got back to working.

'If I work hard now, I can slack off later. Though I don't wanna work for four months for Nasst, I've if it means cutting 4 months from the one year I need to work for him due to the contract, I'll just grit my teeth and live through it. If the worst comes to be, I can just complain about child abuse and ditch the work,' Evin deluded himself.

"First of all, we have to have you learn how to handle Time energy to break down spells, so that will be the first on our list of things to do," Nasst said smilingly.

"By the way, is Time energy going to affect how I age? Should I be worried about that?" Evin asked, reminded of what happened to him after he set off the Time Bomb.

"Ah, something like that won't happen if you put the Time energy through your mana-core first, so don't worry about it. It will only affect you if you expose yourself to foreign time energy… But even in those cases, the growth you might feel will be almost negligible," Nasst said, rubbing his chin.

"Alright."

"In any case, this might be a bit difficult for you since you're a logical mage… So just think that everything time touches will eventually corrode and die out, and that spells aren't exempt from that," Nasst gave some advice on Evin's imagination. He then held out a ball of silver air in front of him and ordered.

"Try to dispel this ball of air using Time energy."

Evin didn't waste time and tried it out. He offered half a kg of mana to the World of Time and received the same amount of Time energy in return. But instead of using it to construct a spell, he just pulled it out of his mana-core and directed it towards the silver air with inordinately ill intentions.

The Time energy mingled with the silver air a bit and Evin could see it corroding the other away due to its nature, albeit a bit slowly. About ten minutes later, Evin saw the silver air dissipating into the air.

'It's a bit slow…' Evin thought in his head.

"Alright, what could you have done better?" Nasst asked, not hurrying to judge Evin's absolute garbage Spell Breaking attempt.

Evin in turn was thinking about how he should improve the thing he just attempted. After mulling over the problem for a little while, he began listing the things he thought of.

"I guess I should consider this act as a spell of some sorts… Give it a proper name, think of how much mana would be needed, and all that stuff…. That should make it easier to cast. There's also the problem of imagination. Obviously, I didn't really do much of that this time, so I'll have to try and imagine the process in my head a few times and see what attempt works best. I guess I should have more specific emotions when I'm trying to cast this spell as well, huh?" Evin said.

Nasst listened and added a few more points as well.

"Your consumption of mana is a bit too high. You can't use a single kgs worth of Time energy to dispel a spell that used one kg of mana. You're using way too much in that case. I recommend you use a little bit to dig away at it, recycle the Time energy a bit. Personally, I think of a beast of some sorts with an endless stomach. It diligently chews at the enemy's spell until nothing is left," Nasst shared his own method of imagination.

"Yes…" Evin nodded thoughtfully.

"Well, you can keep at that for the time being. Just create a stationary spell and try to Brute force your way through it with Time energy. I'll be back after a little while," Nasst said and walked out of the room.

For the next two hours Evin spent most of his time trying find which form of imagination suited him the best. He first tried Nasst's method to see how it worked, but after trying it out, he could tell that it just wasn't for him. 

Then he tried to imagine it as a small disintegrating laser, a concentrated ray of Time energy that would dismantle any spell that it touched. Surprisingly, this one showed some promise, since its ability to simply disintegrate spells into oblivion was extremely powerful. 

If Evin used this against a spell that mainly focused on an intricate structure, like a multipart spell of some sorts or his Floating spell, then he was sure that he could break it by simply disintegrating the most important parts of it. For example, he would try to disintegrate his invisible thrusters of his floating spell, or even try to focus the World Switch of the Heavy World. Evin didn't know how this worked, but it worked so he didn't dwell on it much longer.

But one problem that Evin noticed was that this method cost a lot of his willpower and mana for how small of an area-of-effect it had. If he used this method against a spell that was basically just simple mass of energy, like his Dark Room, then the effects were abysmal. It was like trying to completely get rid of a piece of paper using needles. Sure he could probably rip it in half, but in this particular case, said piece of paper could regenerate itself.

This also made him realize that spells could be classified into at least two categories as well: structural, where the spell is constructed like a machine, with each and every part serving some kind of purpose; and mass-based, which were just blobs of energy that hurt things… or whatever it was called in reality. He decided to ask Nasst about it later.

In any case, he had to create some kind of new way to use against these mass-based spells. He was currently staring at a small piece of the Dark Room in front of him, wondering how he should get rid of it in the most efficient way possible. 

"Shit, I'm so tired..." he said with a sigh, his brain feeling spent and annoyed. He then yawned widely, and could feel the blood rushing through the veins on his head, filling that pink organ inside his head with some much-needed red.

Briefly, his vision blacked out and immediately came back, leaving Evin wondering where he was and what year he was in, like he had just woken from an afternoon nap. As his head processed what just happened and he could finally tell top from bottom, Evin couldn't help but feel extremely satisfied.

"Fuck yeah…" he muttered softly, before worrying about what just happened.

'If I'm blacking out of mental exhaustion at the age of six, it's probably not a good sign… Hmm,' he thought briefly before entering his shadow.

Looking around, he saw that nothing much had changed since the last time he checked. Runa had also fallen asleep at some point, but she was just her normally sleeping, so Evin didn't wish to wake her up.

'Weird how literally any kind of animal needs to lose consciousness every day one way or another…' Evin thought amusedly.

'I guess the reason why those little blackouts I experience are so satisfying is because they're kinda like a mini-sleep,' Evin thought idly, enjoying the serenity and darkness inside his shadow.

Due to the effects that the Vulpine Mother had on him, Evin always felt at home in the darkness. He'd probably go to great lengths to protect his darkness at this point. As he was enjoying his breaktime, a sudden thought appeared in his mind.